I am an intellectual and cultural historian of early America in its transatlantic contexts. My focus is the history of scholarship, books, reading, libraries, and education, as well as the history of art and material culture. I am also interested in the many ways in which early Americans have made sense of the past, from the deep past of earth history to the more recent antiquity of ancient Mediterranean peoples and American Indians. I am currently working on Stanford’s collaborative Mapping the Republic of Letters project, which is digitally mapping some of the major European and American correspondence networks and libraries of the early modern scholarly world (1500-1800). As part of this project I am mapping the extensive correspondence network of Benjamin Franklin, as well as the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the leading library of Enlightenment America.
