What is Europe? Where are Europe’s borders? When did the idea of Europe as an autonomous continent emerge? These questions may seem drawn from today’s headlines, but they were essential on the brink of early modernity, when Europe’s continental contours were first drawn. My research shows that Europe—all too often equated with “the West”—is an astonishingly unexamined continent commonly taken as a fixed and stable category, immune to time or history, a monolith within a broader discussion of a “world” in flux. My work is a corrective to existing studies of the early modern period, as I push against the tendency to either take the existence of a consolidated and immobile Europe for granted or to reduce the focus of inquiry to Western European countries. “Provincializing Europe,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has long advocated, demands a return to the question of what Europe actually means and meant—now and in the past. It calls for an in-depth examination of the complex developments across multiple literary, cultural, and linguistic traditions that came to shape Europe as a both dynamic and controversial entity. One of the central hypotheses driving my research is that the new imagining of Europe in the early modern period was fueled by a twofold development commonly subsumed under the umbrella term Renaissance humanism: on the one hand, the rise of new disciplines (cartography, philology, translation) and, on the other, the emergence of new performative art forms: opera, ballet, revivals of ancient theater.

Over the past several years, I have given these two distinct—and yet intertwined—pathways the shape of two monographs: Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Hercules: Procreative Poetics and the Rise of the Opera Libretto, which I am now completing. Cartographic Humanism argues that an unprecedented vision of Europe as an autonomous continent was driven by the emergence of cartography as a new discipline central to Renaissance humanism. In Hercules, I delve into the rise of the opera libretto as a gendered genre intimately tied, I claim, to rising European absolutism and the exclusion of women from power. Supported by numerous national and international grants and fellowships, my research has also taken the form of many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, besides several other article-length publications. My interest in space and geography as a generative force in early modernity has directed me toward the investigation of questions concerning the power of maps and the impact of geography in our contemporary world: with an eye to the paradox of decreasing geographic knowledge in times of increasing spatial analytical technologies, I am currently co-editing, with my colleague Tom Conley, a volume on The Future of Geography. Together with Tom Conley, I am the co-founder and co-chair of the Cartography Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center.

I have served, among others, as a member on editorial and advisory boards, on fellowship selection committees, as a book manuscript and journal article referee (University of Chicago Press, Edinburgh University Press, Brill; Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Humanistica Lovaniensia (Journal of Neo-Latin Studies), and Italian Studies), and as an invited book reviewer (Renaissance Quarterly, Global Intellectual History, Forum Italicum, Journal of Contemporary European Studies).