My primary research interest is the afterlife of humanism in the eighteenth century, and in particular, the way in which antiquaries and historians imagined, researched, and wrote about the remote past. Most of my publications have focused on the narrative and visual tradition of antiquarianism. I am currently writing a book about the varieties of world history in early modern Europe.
I teach courses in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. After receiving my PhD in history from Princeton, I taught at Stanford, the University of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. At Harvard, I teach an HL90 seminar on early modern Europe and colonial America and a sophomore tutorial on medieval and early modern Europe. I also supervise History and Literature theses on a variety of topics in early modern European history.