Contributors
Frederick M. Asher
Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
He is South Asia editor for Archives of Asian Art; president of the National Committee for the History of Art; a member of the Executive Bureau of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art; and chair of development for the American Institute of Indian Studies. His interests include contested space, resulting in the publication of Bodh Gaya (Oxford, 2008); representations of the sites associated with the life of the Buddha (resulting in an article forthcoming in Artibus Asiae and a book in progress); and the emerging field of world art history (with a new project on the visual culture of the Indian Ocean).
Stephen P. Blake
Senior Research Associate at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota
His research interests include the Mughal and Safavid empires and the comparative history of the three early modern Islamic empires: the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman. His publications include Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739 (Cambridge, 1991) and Half the World: The Social Architecture of Safavid Isfahan, 1590-1722 (Mazda, 1999). He has just finished a comparative study: “Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires.”
Timothy Brook
Professor of History at the University of British Columbia
One of his research interests is the social and cultural history of China in the context of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world. His recently published books in this area include Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury, 2008) and The Troubled Empire: China during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Harvard, 2010). His other research interests include the Japanese occupation of China during WWII, which led to Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard, 2005).
Luca Codignola-Bo
Head of the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe of the Italian National Research Council; professor of North American History at the University of Genoa; and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University of Halifax, Nova Scotia
His main field of research is the Roman Catholic Church in the North Atlantic area in the early modern era. He has also written on early European expansion. In recent years he has written Colombo e altri navigatori (Frilli, 2007) and edited, with Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Humans in Outer Space: Interdisciplinary Odysseys (Springer, 2009).
Denis Crouzet
Professor of History at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne; director of IRCOM (Institut de Recherches sur les Civilizations de l’Occident Moderne)
He specializes in the study of the sixteenth century, especially religious conflict and violence, and the history of mentalités. His publications include Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525-vers 1610) (Champ Vallon, 1990); La sagesse et le malheur: Michel de L’Hospital, chancelier de France (Champ Vallon, 1998); and Dieu en ses royaumes: Une histoire des guerres de religion (Champ Vallon, 2008).
Graeme Murdock
Lecturer in European History at Trinity College, Dublin
His research interests include the history of religion in early modern Hungary and France. His publications include Calvinism on the Frontier: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church of Hungary and Transylvania, c. 1600-1660 (Oxford, 2000); Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (Ashgate, 2002) (editor); Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches, c. 1540-1620 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and The Hungarian Reformation: Books from the National Széchényi Library, Hungary (IDC Brill, 2009) (advisory editor).
William D. Phillips, Jr.
Professor of History at the University of Minnesota; former director of the Center for Early Modern History (2001-2008)
His previous publications include Testimonies from the Columbus Lawsuits (edited Brepols, 2000); Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minnesota, 1985); and Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile (Medieval Academy of America, 1978). With Carla Rahn Phillips he has published two prize-winning books: The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1992) and Spain’s Golden Fleece (Johns Hopkins, 1997), as well as the recent A Concise History of Spain (Cambridge, 2010). He is a corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History.
Marguerite Ragnow
Curator of the James Ford Bell Library; member of the graduate faculty in History at the University of Minnesota
She is managing editor of the journal Terrae Incognitae for the Society for the History of Discoveries. Her publications include Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia and the West (co-editor; Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the first volume in this CEMH series, Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia, and the Americas (co-editor; Minneapolis, 2009).
Jamie Rae Bluestone
Former associate director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota (2007-2010)
In Fall 2010, she defended her dissertation “Before Lisbon: Earthquakes in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” which uses Europeans’ encounter with the Americas as an entry point for exploring the religious and scientific views of earthquakes from ancient times to the present. Following the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in early 2010, she was featured on a “University of Minnesota Moment” about changing perceptions of natural disasters.
James D. Tracy
Emeritus professor of History at the University of Minnesota; former director of the Center for Early Modern History
He is co-founder (1995) and editor-in-chief (2001-2010) of the Journal of Early Modern History. He is editor of The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350-1750 (Cambridge, 1990); The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 (Cambridge, 1991); and City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000). His most recent book is The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance and Politics in Holland, 1574-1586 (Oxford, 2008). He is working on a synthetic overview of the Habsburg-Ottoman conflict in the Balkans in the sixteenth century.
Anne Marie Wolf
Assistant professor of History at the University of Maine in Farmington
She is the author of a forthcoming book on Juan de Segovia with the University of Notre Dame Press. In addition to Christians’ perceptions of Muslims, her research interests include the social and power circles surrounding intellectuals in fifteenth-century Spain.