Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Chair of Early Modern European History

Current Research Project: Rethinking Humankind: Humanist Agency and the Early-Modern European Discourse on Humanity and Natural Rights

My doctoral research focuses on how sixteenth-century humanists, particularly those who have been labeled by modern scholars as “second-rate” thinkers, have put to good use their editorial skills, and presented through their works their own understanding of civility, humanity, and foreign societies. The aim of my research is to reconsider the parameters within which the sixteenth-century European discourse about humanity and natural rights accommodated extra-European societies, or to be more precise, societies that Europeans themselves considered to be different from their own, in this case the Ottoman Empire.