Expertise
I am a historian of law and political economy, particularly in the early modern world (c. 1450 to c. 1800). While I focus primarily on the commercial, legal, and political ideas and institutions of European states, several invitations have allowed me to begin exploring these themes also in Latin America. I believe that the early modern world is best studied through interdisciplinary methods, over long time horizons and across expansive geographies. I also have active interests in the philosophy of history, political theory, and the use and abuse of history in policy debates; in regard to the last, my work centers historical experience in the analysis of economic crises and monetary policy.
Before coming to the University of Miami, I was Lauro de Bosis Fellow in the Departments of History and of the Classics at Harvard University, where I had previously earned my PhD. I have also held two postdoctoral positions in the Department of History and School of Law at Duke University; in this capacity, I joined the Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminar "Corporations and International Law: Past, Present, and Future," and then worked on a project exploring the cultural and intellectual world of Francesco Casoni, a 16th-century legal expert and humanist working within the Venetian Empire. These positions and my time in Miami have allowed me to further interrogate the exciting ways in which Roman law has shaped thought and lived experience since antiquity. As my research profile indicates, I structured my graduate studies to examine the development of Roman law in the ancient Mediterranean in order to better appreciate its nuances and the imprints of its early formation when investigating its later history, particularly within the dynamic commercial and political environments of the early modern world.
My current book project considers how Roman law was used in the context of the emergence of political economy from the 16th through the 18th century. I diverge from other accounts of the creation of political economy in arguing that Roman law was foundational, and not only because many purple passages from the most famous ancient legal texts reappear in the early modern works that constituted this developing conversation; Roman law was central also because its categories, mechanisms, and indeed its theorizing of governance—which, when combined with aspects of medieval Aristotelianism, yielded cosmologies irresistible to universalizing rulers in early modern Europe—undergird, often implicitly, conceptions of political communities and discussions of exchange within and among such communities in those early modern works.
I am also producing a co-authored translation, with introduction and substantial commentary, of Francesco Casoni's De Indiciis of 1557. This fascinating and under-appreciated text offers a window onto the legal and administrative culture of early modern Italy, and by contextualizing the work and explaining how Casoni made use of his many sources, my co-author and I hope to demonstrate that such seemingly technical legal treatises are integral to our appreciation of early modern social and political history, and are readily intelligible. Additionally, I am co-editing a volume on the historical and contemporary relationships between law and political economy, in terms of both theory and policy. This project brings together historians, lawyers, and economists to explore, among other topics, the complex ways in which law and political economy have influenced policy goals in various historical settings, how this occurs in the present, and why the effects of policy do or do not prompt changes in the theories and methods of law and political economy.