My academic work
I am a socio-legal historian of the early modern German-speaking lands, with research and teaching interests in law and society, law and language, secularity and secularism, law and religion, Reformation history, and legal histories of the early modern. I earned my Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of California, Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law from 2019-2021.
In general, my scholarship investigates legal, religious, and political change in the early modern period through the lens of legal practice and institutions. As an historian of law and legal culture, I am committed to uncovering—through close readings of workaday sources—the first-person structures of experience produced at law; identifying the concepts, thoughts, and images that constitute those experiences; and tracing out the practical, linguistic, and social conditions in which those experiences become possible.
You can listen to a brief podcast episode through the Baldy Center in which I discuss my work, here:
Why I do legal history
I do legal history because I get a thrill from piecing together the details of arcane legal instruments, and discovering what went without saying for those who used them. Unearthing these usages has not simply excited my antiquarian intrigue, however. Instead, I have found that the largest-scale, most consequential transformations in history inevitably redounded upon the lives of individuals in community and left their traces in the minutiae of legal discourse and juridical technique.
I do legal history because it allows me to explore all of the dimensions of law as a human endeavor, indexing sets of practices, modes of normativity, traditions of materiality, and constellations of meaning in every time and place imaginable.
I do legal history because I am fascinated by the law’s capacity to actualize the full spectrum of human states—from dignity and virtuousness, to depravity and monstrousness, and everything in between. Law preserves peace, it provides order, and protects rights; but it also justifies oppression, obscures social realities, and shields those in power. Legal history allows me to probe all of these dimensions of human experience.