Keynote
September 17, 2025 • 5:30pm–7:00pm
Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Professor of History, and Dean of the College at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian, European, and American history. He has written on a variety of topics, such as the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, the relations between Russian literature and science, the life and chemistry of Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, the history of nuclear weapons and intelligence, science and pseudoscience, and more. His most recent book, co-authored with Diana Kormos Buchwald, is Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein (Oxford, 2025), which is a compact study of the life and work of the scientist.
Constructing Knowledge: Error, Uncertainty, Variation
September 18, 2025 • 9:10am–10:50am
Paola Bertucci is a professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on science, technology, and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in Europe. She is the author, among many other publications, of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Louis Gottschalk prize for best book in Eighteenth-Century Studies, and In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), winner of the 2025 Paul Bunge prize for best book on the history of scientific instruments. She has also collaborated on several museum exhibitions both in Europe and the United States.
Darin Hayton is Associate Professor of history of science at Haverford College. He works on the history of astrology and related divinatory practices in pre-modern Europe. His first book investigates the many roles for astrology at the Holy Roman Court during Emperor Maximilian I’s reign. He is currently working on two related projects: a study of the Greek tradition of Ptolemy's Centiloquium, a collection of astrological aphorisms, and its afterlives in European vernaculars, including a fascinating collection of aphorisms by the Leipzig professor Conrad Töckler. Professor Hayton is also working on a study of the family of divinatory practices often called “The Sphere of Petosiris.” This set of practices circulated widely in Greek, Latin, and European vernaculars well into the 19th century. He is also the co-editor of a series on the history of science, “Refractions,” published by Lever Press, an open access press.
Priyamvada Nambrath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientifc history of India with a focus on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage and pedagogy. Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of focus around her project. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and ocean-facing histories of the region. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholarship program, the American Philosophical Society and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her papers are forthcoming in Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions: Contributions to Current Research in Indology and the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Eleanor Webb is a seventh year PhD Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the history of scientific thought, the politics of knowledge production, and the linguistic and literary cultures of education. Her current dissertation project studies sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian academies and their relationships with university learning. In this work, she is interested in how intellectual communities, patronage networks and institutional preoccupations shaped the development of ideas, especially about what constituted “legitimate” knowledge at a given time. Her next project will investigate the social and political history of astrology in the seventeenth century, and focus on the use of astrological knowledge in facilitating episodes of cross-cultural encounter.
The Social Lives of Secrets: Concealment and Control of Information
September 18, 2025 • 11:00am–12:10pm
Christopher P. Atwood (Ph.D. 1994, Indiana University) is professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches the history of Mongolia and the Inner Asian borderlands of China. His research ranges from the Mongol empire to the early twentieth century, with a focus on ethnicity, religion, and historiography. His most recent works include two books of translations: Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (2021), and a new translation of Secret History of the Mongols in the Penguin Classics series (2023).
Paul M. Cobb is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Islamic History in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Middle East Center. His areas of interest include historiography, Islamic relations with the West, animal studies, and travel and exploration. He is the author of numerous studies, including Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades (Oneworld, 2005); The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades (Penguin Classics, 2008), and The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also the co-editor (with Wout van Bekkum) of Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Peeters, 2003) and (with Antoine Borrut) of Umayyad Legacies: History and Memory from Syria to Spain (E. J. Brill, 2010).
Benedek Láng is a historian and medievalist (PhD, Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2003). He is currently Professor and Head of Department at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His research focuses on the history of science, with particular specialisation in two areas: late medieval manuscripts concerning learned magic, and early modern practices of secret communication, including artificial languages and cipher systems. His major publications include Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (Penn State University Press, 2008); Real Life Cryptology: Ciphers and Secrets in Early Modern Hungary (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); and The Rohonc Code (Penn State University Press, 2021). His work engages with a wide range of sources spanning several centuries and genres, from personal diaries and magical treatises to enigmatic, as yet undeciphered texts.
Asserting Authority: The Art of Lies, Idle Talk, and Trickery
September 18, 2025 • 1:10pm–2:50pm
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (UPenn, History Department) is a historian of the early modern Ottoman world. His research focuses on intellectual and cultural history and its connections to literature, poetry, and bureaucracy. His current book project, A Sea of Gossip: Truth and Imagination in the Early Modern Mediterranean, is a history of various forms of informal exchange of information that today we refer to as gossip, anecdote, or rumor, as they shaped and transformed the early modern Mediterranean. Aguirre-Mandujano’s first monograph, Occasions for Poetry: Politics, Literature and Imagination Among the Early Modern Ottomans (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2025), is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping the Ottoman political and social experience after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Aguirre-Mandujano is co-organizer of the Baki Project, a Digital Humanities project that aims to develop new digital tools for the study of Ottoman manuscripts.
Ada Kuskowski is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on cultural histories of legal knowledge in France and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. Her book Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2023) traces the impact of transformations in writing, language, manuscript culture on customary law in medieval France. She is currently developing two book projects, ‘Laws of Conquest: Legal Cultures of the Crusader States in European History’ and ‘Legal Truth: A History of Law and Uncertainty.’ Her research interests include legal literatures, notions of authorship, material cultures of law and colonial law.
Pawel Maciejko is Associate Professor of History and Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Chair in Classical Jewish Religion, Thought, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. Born and raised in Poland and educated at Oxford, Maciejko moved to Israel in 2004; between 2007 and 2017 he served on the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), won the The Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in Humanistic Disciplines, The Salo Baron Prize for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies and The Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for the Best Book in Modern Jewish History and was translated into a number of languages. He is also the author of a critical edition of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz’s Kabbalistic tract Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, and Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity (Brandeis University Press, 2017) and co-editor of two collected volumes in Jewish History.
Julia Verkholantsev is a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, linguistic culture, religion, and intellectual history. Her publications and research focus on the cultural space of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. She is the author of several books, and is currently completing a book on the role of etymological commentary and storytelling in historical discourse, provisionally titled The Etymological Method and Historical Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She also founded and serves as editor of two book series, Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe with MIP, Kalamazoo, and Medieval Library of Rus, Ruthenia, and Muscovy with NIUP-Cornell, both dedicated to making primary sources on the early history of these regions available in English translation for teaching and research. At Penn, she founded and directed the interdisciplinary program in Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2017–2024) and served as Director of the Undergraduate Humanities Forum at the Wolf Humanities Center in 2022–2023 and 2024–2025. She is honored to serve as the Wolf Humanities Center's Topic Director for 2025–2026, leading the exploration of the theme Truth.
Visualizing Histories: Is All Truth That Meets the Eye?
September 18, 2025 • 3:00pm–4:10pm
Zoë Opačić is Associate Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at Birkbeck College University of London, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Council Member of the British Archaeological Association. She specialises in medieval art, architecture and urbanism in Central Europe with a particular focus on the development of late medieval cities. As a visiting Fellow (2020-2021) of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (University of Erfurt), she worked on the project entitled Architecture, Spectacle and Ritual in the Late Medieval City, which explored the urbanistic transformation of Krakow, Prague, and Vienna in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her current project is Vicke Schorler’s remarkable view of 16th-century Rostock in the Rostock City Archive.
Lynn Ransom is the Curator of Programs for the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at Penn Libraries where she also oversees the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and serves as a co-editor of the journal Manuscript Studies. Before coming to Penn, she has held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. Since 2016, she has served on the Board of Directors of Digital Scriptorium, a growing consortium of North American institutions with collections of global premodern manuscripts, and has led the redevelopment of the Digital Scriptorium Catalog, an online platform for a national union catalog of premodern manuscripts held in North American collections.
Emily Steiner is the A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of three single-authored books, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Reading 'Piers Plowman' (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400 ( Oxford University Press, 2021). She has co-edited several collection of essays, The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002), with Candace Barrington, Thinking Historically About Historicism (Chaucer Review, 2014), with Lynn Ransom, Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts (2015), and with Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler, The Cambridge History of History Writing: England and Britain, 500-1500 (2019). Her articles have appeared in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Representations, New Literary History, and Exemplaria, among many other journals. She is presently writing a book on animals in premodern literature and culture (Reaktion Books), editing a volume on medieval English prose for Oxford University Press (with Sebastian Sobecki), and editing several volumes on medieval Jews and Judaism (with Samantha Seal). With Tekla Bude and Michael Calabrese she is working on a translation of Piers Plowman. Her research interests extend to natural history and the history of information, law and literature, drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests include Old English literature, Chaucer, Arthurian literature, alliterative poetry, and poetry of all periods.
The Value of the Fake: Forgery as Historical Testimony
September 18, 2025 • 4:20pm–5:30pm
Nicholas Herman is the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at Penn Libraries. Nicholas received his doctorate in 2014 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a dissertation focusing on the French Renaissance court painter, Jean Bourdichon. Prior to arriving at Penn in 2016, he has held fellowships at the Université de Montreal, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2007 to 2010, he worked in the department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. He has contributed to numerous catalog and exhibition projects and has published articles in Word and Image, Burlington Magazine, Journal of the History of Collections, Manuscripta, and Gesta. His books include Le livre enluminé, entre représentation et illusion (2018), Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries (2020), and, co-written with Anne-Marie Eze, Bourdichon's Boston Hours (2021).
Kenneth Lapatin is curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Trained as a classical archaeologist at Berkeley and Oxford, he has been awarded fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the American Academy in Rome, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History, as well as monographs, exhibition catalogues, and articles on diverse aspects of ancient art and its modern reception. His research interests, in addition to forgery, include the materials, techniques, and functions of ancient art, the cities buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79, luxury, and historiography.
Balázs Nagy is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Medieval History at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He completed his studies in Budapest and undertook extended research stays in Edinburgh, Toronto, Leuven, and Wassenaar (Netherlands). He is a founding board member of the Medieval Central European Research Network (MECERN). He has published widely on the economic and commercial history and networks of medieval Hungary and Central Europe, with particular attention to trade networks and cross-regional connections. His recent research focuses on the impact of the Mongol invasions on Central Europe in the thirteenth century and their broader Eurasian context.