I’m a historian of early modern Rome (1500-1800). My research explores a wide range of topics in political, social, and cultural history from popular politics, print culture, urban space and legal practices to artists’ organizations and male households. In Rome men made up the majority of the population, and my most recent book, City of Men: Service and Servants in Baroque Rome (Viella, 2023), asks what manhood was in the absence of women and how a patriarchal society justified the subordination of most men to the few. My earlier books Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princton University Press, 1992) and Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) looked at other aspects of power in a capital at the center of a web of interests, global and local, sacred and secular, religious and political.
Professor of History and Letters
