E. Natalie Rothman is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC. She is interested in the history of Venetian-Ottoman cultural mediation in the early modern period, diplomatic translation and translators, the genealogies of Orientalism, the history of archives, and digital scholarship. She was a member of the inaugural cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2014-2021).
Rothman was trained as an historical anthropologist, first at Tel Aviv University (MA in Culture Research, summa cum laude, 1999) and then at the University of Michigan (PhD in Anthropology and History, 2006). 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. The book received the 2012 Herbert Baxter Adams prize for best first book in European History and the Howard R. Marraro prize for best book in Italian history, both from the American Historical Association, as well as the 2013 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Prize for best book in Renaissance Venetian Studies from the Renaissance Society of America. Its Turkish edition was recently published under the title İmparatorluk simsarlari: Venedik ile İstanbul Arasında Mekik Dokuyanlar (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2016). The history of cultural mediation, the genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire are also the focus of Rothman’s second monograph, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell University Press, 2021). This Open Access book-cum-digital platform has been generously funded by the Social Sciences 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’s articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Radical History Review, Journal of Early Modern History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Mediterranean Historical Review, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Quaderni Storici, Oriente Moderno, and elsewhere. Her current collaborative research centres on the question of trans-imperial archives, exploring the entangled history of Venetian and Ottoman chancery practices and archival formations in the early modern period.
Rothman offers lecture courses on the early modern Mediterranean and on the history of Venice and its empire, and advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars on digital history, the history of archives, translators and interpreters, travel writing, and Mediterranean historiography. For short descriptions and sample course outlines, click here. For a complete CV, click here.