The Commons at Helm Library - Original Steering Committee

I am a historian of late medieval Europe, broadly interested in social and economic change in the pre-modern Mediterranean. My book in progress, Public debt and civic culture in fourteenth-century Genoa, examines how the fourteenth-century explosion of public indebtedness in Genoa inflected both private and public life, drawing on a wide variety of methodologies and sources including financial records, legal privileges, sermons and poetry. I am also currently working on several articles on topics including the church's influence on medieval economic life and the role of identity in shaping Mediterranean trading networks.

In addition to regularly offering World Civilization I and a general survey of medieval European history, I plan to offer a courses in medieval, Mediterranean and Italian history. In the past, I have taught on a variety of subjects, including the Normans, religion and economy in the Middle Ages, Italy and the medieval Mediterranean world, and cultural encounter in medieval Sicily. In 2015, I will teach a history of the Crusades, and in future years I plan to develop courses on the pre-industrial economy, travel and cultural encounter in the Middle Ages, and a history of slavery before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.