Natalie Rothman

Biography

E. Natalie Rothman is a Professor of History, specializing in the history of the Mediterranean in the early modern period. Her interests include the history of Venetian-Ottoman diplomacy, diplomatic translators and interpreters, the genealogies of Orientalism, the history of archives, and digital scholarship. Rothman was trained as an historical anthropologist, first at Tel Aviv University (MA in Culture Research, 1999) and then at the University of Michigan (PhD in Anthropology and History, 2006). She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Radical History Review, Journal of Early Modern History, Mediterranean Historical Review, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Quaderni Storici, Oriente Moderno, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, and elsewhere. Her first book, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011) explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her second monograph, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant (Cornell University Press, 2021), continued to explore the history of cultural mediation, the genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire. The book and its companion digital project, The Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform, have been generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library, a Jackman Humanities Fellowship at the University of Toronto, and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government. Rothman has taught courses on the early modern Mediterranean and on the history of Venice and its empire, and advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars on the histories of translators and interpreters, converts and missionaries, travellers and travel-writing, archives, and digital history.

Visit Prof. Rothman’s homepage to read more about her.

Education

M.A. (Tel Aviv)
Ph.D. (Michigan)

Research Interests

• Historical Anthropology
• Early Modern Mediterranean
• Postcolonial Theory
• Semiotics
• Translation Studies