Lillian E. Datchev

Klarman Post-doctoral Fellow

Overview

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of premodern Europe. My research spans the histories of knowledge, material culture, and early capitalism in medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

My current book project builds on my dissertation, "The Origins of Antiquarian Scholarship, 1204-1453," and examines how and why Italian humanists began to systematically study classical and early Christian artifacts from the fifteenth century on. It shows that this scholarly movement originated in cultural traditions that first developed in mercantile communities in the Italian colonies and commercial outposts in the Adriatic, Aegean, and Crimean regions. My second book project investigates the intellectual culture of Renaissance merchants more generally.

I received a BA in philosophy and the history of mathematics and science from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland in 2013, a MA in the cultural and intellectual history of the Renaissance from the Warburg Institute in 2016, and a PhD in history from Princeton University in 2024. My research has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in post-classical Latin at UCLA in 2016-2017, a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Bologna in 2020-2021, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome in 2021-2022.

Publications

"Ciriaco d'Ancona and the Origins of Epigraphy." Renaissance Quarterly 76.2 (Summer 2023): 1-53.

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