E. Natalie Rothman's Homepage

About myself:

I am an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the early modern Mediterranean, Venetian-Ottoman relations, and the history and historiography of conversion, translation, and empire. I am also involved in a new initiative for a humanities-wide program, Intersections of the Humanities. My research interests include the early modern Mediterranean, historical anthropology, and the genealogies of Orientalism. My book manuscript Trans-Imperial Subjects: Boundary Markers of the Early Modern Mediterranean (forthcoming, Cornell University Press) explores the intersecting histories of diplomatic interpreters, converts, commercial brokers and other people who straddled and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My new project is tentatively titled The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant. For my complete CV click here.

Publications:

• “Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 21, 1 (June 2006): 39-75. For a copy click here.
• "Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean." PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006. For a copy click here.
• “Self-Fashioning in the Mediterranean Contact Zone: Giovanni Battista Salvago and his Africa overo Barbaria (1625),” in Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009, pp. 123-143. For a copy click here.
• “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 4 (October 2009): 771-800. For a copy click here.
• “Genealogies of Mediation: 'Culture Broker' and Imperial Governmentality.” Forthcoming in Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and the Question of Discipline, ed. David W. Cohen, University of Michigan Press, 2010.
• Trans-Imperial Subjects: Boundary-Markers of the Early Modern Mediterranean. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2011.

In Progress...

• “Narrating Conversion and Subjecthood in the Venetian-Ottoman Contact Zone.” Accepted for publication in The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature. Eds. Harald Hendrix, Todd Richardson and Lieke Stelling. Leiden: Brill  (forthcoming, 2010).
• “Mediating Converts, Commensurating Differences: Boundary-Marking and Boundary-Crossing in the Venetian-Ottoman Borderlands.” Invited article for a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on religious hybridity in the early modern Mediterranean, ed. John J. Martin (forthcoming, 2011).
• The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant (book manuscript in progress).

Undergraduate courses taught:

The Early Modern Mediterranean, 1500-1800 (W07, W08, S08). This b-level course explores the interplay of culture, religion, politics and commerce in the Mediterranean region from 1500 to 1800. Through travel narratives, autobiographical texts, and visual materials the course traces how men and women on the Mediterranean’s European, Asian, and African shores experienced their changing world. For a syllabus click here.

Old Worlds? Strangers and Foreigners in the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 (F07). This c-level course explores how medieval and early modern societies encountered foreigners and accounted for foreignness, as well as for religious, linguistic, and cultural difference more broadly. Topics include: monsters, relics, pilgrimage, the rise of the university, merchant companies, mercenaries, piracy, captivity and slavery, tourism, and the birth of resident embassies. For a syllabus click here.

Venice and its Empire, 800-1800 (F06, F07). This c-level course explores the history of Venice and its empire in the Mediterranean from its humble beginnings as a fishermen’s colony in the ninth century CE to its occupation by Napoleon in 1797. The primary focus is Venice (including its colonies in northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the Aegean) and, to a lesser extent, its major political rival and economic ally, the Ottoman Empire. For a syllabus click here.

Missionaries and Converts in the Early Modern World (F06). This d-level seminar explores how early modern people thought about and practiced community, belief, and ritual, and situates these thoughts and practices within the context of early imperialism and colonialism. The seminar looks at religious conversion in relation to other social processes, including empire-building, and examines whether the “globalization of Christianity” is a useful paradigm through which to understand the experiences of missionaries and converts in different parts of the world in the period 1500-1800. For a syllabus click here.

Between Two Worlds? Translators and Interpreters in History (W07). This d-level seminar explores the social history of translators, interpreters, and the texts they produce. Through several case studies from Ireland and Istanbul to Québec, Mexico City, and Goa, the course considers how translators shaped public understandings of "self" and "other," "civilization" and "barbarity" in the wake of European colonization. For a syllabus click here.

Travelling and Travel-Writing in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (S08). This d-level seminar explores the development of travel and travel narratives before 1800, and their relationship to European trade and colonisation in the Mediterranean and beyond. Topics include: Prester John and the allure of the East, pilgrimage and crusading, the histories of geography, cartography, and ethnography. For a syllabus click here.

Graduate courses taught:

Histories in/of the Mediterranean: From Braudel to Post-Colonialism (W08). This graduate seminar addresses the emergence and recent transformation of the early modern Mediterranean as an historical object. It offers an overview of the historiography of the early modern Mediterranean from Braudel to his most recent critics, and situates this historiography within the broader field of contemporary scholarship and politics. In particular, the seminar explores the methodological and epistemological implications of post-colonial critiques of Orientalism and Occidentalism on the one hand, and of the ongoing conversations between historians and anthropologists of the Mediterranean on the other. For a syllabus click here.

Conferences and workshops organized

I was the co-organizer of a workshop on networks of interaction in the early modern Mediterranean, which met in Toronto on Oct. 12-13, 2007. Click here for the workshop homepage.

I was also the co-director of an international workshop on Language and Cultural Mediation in the Mediterranean, 1200-1800, part of the 10th session of the Mediterranean Research Meeting at the European University Institute, held in Montecatini Terme, Italy, in March 2009. Click here for more information and here for the workshop poster .