Professor of Early Modern History

Contact Details

Biography

I studied History and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, before taking a Master’s degree in History at McMaster University (Canada) and spending a year at the Università degli Studi di Urbino, courtesy of an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholarship. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on the system of the sacred in southern Italy during the Counter Reformation. This was followed by a one-year Rome Scholarship at the British School at Rome, where I worked on Jesuit popular missions in southern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. I then took up a three-year Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship at the Cambridge Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, held jointly with a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, where my research focused on forms of healing in early modern Italy. During this time I was briefly Assistant Director and, later, Director of the Canadian Academic Centre in Italy (Rome). In 1994 I joined the University of Leicester as Wellcome Lecturer in the Department of History, and was promoted to Reader in History in 1999 and Professor of Early Modern History in 2007. During 2003-8 I was a core member of the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in ‘Cultures and practices of health’, held jointly at the Universities of Warwick and Leicester. I have been Visiting Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London; Hannah Visiting Professor, McMaster University; Visiting Professor, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence); and, most recently, Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (2007-10), with a project on the reception and assimilation of New World plants in Italy. 

Research

• Research Interests
• Publications

PhD Supervision

Social and cultural history (early modern Italy); social history of medicine (early modern Europe); history of food and diet in early modern Europe.

Teaching

HS1100 People and Places: Menocchio: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Miller (and Heretic) and His World

HS2235 Cultural History

Special Study Module (Medical School): Disease and Healing in Europe, 1500-1800

Most Recent Publications

• Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550-2000 (London: Continuum, 2012). Italian translation: Patate, sempre patate. Storia di un alimento italiano (Bologna: il Mulino, in press).
• Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, Columbia University Press (New York), for their series ‘Arts and traditions of the table: perspectives on culinary history’, 2010. Italian translation: La purpurea meraviglia. Storia del pomodoro in Italia, Garzanti Libri (Milan), 2010.
•  Malattia e guarigione. Ciarlatani, guaritori e seri professionisti, trans. Paolo Pacciolla, Nardò: Edizioni ControLuce, 2008.
• Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, Oxford University Press, 2006. Awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s ‘Jason A. Hannah’ medal.