Notes on Contributors
Daniel Barbu
(PhD University of Geneva, 2012; Habilitation University of Bern, 2020) is a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris-Sciences-et-Lettres Research University, Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (UMR 8584). He is the author of Naissance de l’idolâtrie (Presses universitaires de Liège, 2016) and one of the editors of ASDIWAL—Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions.
Vincent Carretta
Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in transatlantic historical and literary studies during the long eighteenth century. In addition to more than one hundred articles and reviews on a range of eighteenth-century subjects, Vin has published two books on verbal and visual Anglophone political satire between 1660 and 1820, as well as authoritative editions of the works of Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Philip Quaque, and other eighteenth-century transatlantic authors of African descent. Vin has also published biographies of Equiano (Penguin, 2007) and Phillis Wheatley (University of Georgia Press, 2014). His most recent books are editions of the writings of Ignatius Sancho (Broadview, 2015) and Phillis Wheatley (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Ananya Chakravarti
is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. She has published extensively in fields ranging from early modern history, focusing on the Portuguese empire, South Asia, and colonial Brazil, to history of emotions and history of religion. Her first monograph is The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received an honorable mention for the Association of Asian Studies’ Bernard S. Cohn book prize for the best first book on South Asia.
Talya Fishman
studies the intellectual and cultural history of Jews living in Christian and Islamic lands in the medieval and early modern periods. She is an Associate Professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Jewish Studies Program. Along with many articles, Fishman is the author of Shaking the Pillars of Exile: “Voice of a Fool”’s Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford University Press, 1997), and Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and co-editor of Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews (Liverpool University Press, 2018).
Rolando Minuti
is Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence. His research is mainly devoted to the European historical culture during the long 18th century, the representations of the Orient, the work of Montesquieu and other leading authors of the Age of Enlightenment. Among his publications: Oriente barbarico e storiografia settecentesca (Marsilio, 1994); Montesquieu, Spicilège. Edité par R. Minuti, et annoté par S. Rotta (The Voltaire Foundation, 2002); Orientalismo e idee di tolleranza nella cultura francese del primo ’700 (Olschki, 2006); Una geografia politica della diversità. Studi su Montesquieu (Liguori, 2015; English edition, Springer, 2018).
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano
is Research Scientist (CSIC, Spain). His areas of expertise are: Sociology of religious elites in Morocco; Spanish Protectorate over Northern Morocco; history of Spanish Early Modern Orientalism. He has numerous publications in collective books and journals such as Annales, Al-Qantara, Journal of Early Modern History, Studia Islamica. He is also author of several books, like Familias de Fez (ss. XV–XVII) (CSIC, 1995), and co-author, with Mercedes García-Arenal, of The Orient in Spain. Converted Muslims, The Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism (Brill, 2013).
Paul A. Rule
is an Honorary Associate of the China Studies Research Centre, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and is associated with the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco, and the Macau Ricci Institute for which he is engaged in projects on the Jesuit missionaries in China. Before retirement from teaching he taught history and religious studies at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. He is currently editing a four-volume annotated translation of the Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation, from a manuscript in the Jesuit Archives in Rome. The first volume was published (The Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation) by the Jesuit Historical Institute (Rome 2015) and the second (Leiden 2019) in a new Brill series edited by the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, ‘Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia’, with two more forthcoming. He is also completing a three volume history of the Chinese Rites Controversy.
Knut Martin Stünkel
received his PhD in philosophy from Bielefeld University and is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Religion at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe’ at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES), Ruhr University Bochum. His research and publications address philosophical and religious thought in early modern times, the theory of religious contact, and the development of the study of Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Giovanni Tarantino
is Senior Research Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Florence, the Chair of the COST Action ‘People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement Across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)’ and co-editor of the journals Cromohs—Cyber Review of Modern Historiography and Emotions: History, Culture, Society. He specialises in Early Modern Intellectual History and History of Emotions. His publications include Republicanism, Sinophilia and Historical Writing: Thomas Gordon (c.1691–1750) and his History of England (Brepols, 2012); Lo scrittoio di Anthony Collins (1676–1729): I libri e i tempi di un libero pensatore (FrancoAngeli, 2007) and Martin Clifford (1624–1677): Deismo e tolleranza nell’Inghilterra della Restaurazione (Olschki, 2000). He has contributed to major discipline-defining projects including the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion (2021); The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714 (forthcoming); The Routledge History Handbook of Emotions (2019); Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500–1900 (Brill, 2019). He has recently co-edited (with Charles Zika) Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2019).
Paola von Wyss-Giacosa
has been a lecturer, researcher and guest curator at the Ethnographic Museum, University of Zurich, since 1997. Her research interests include Historical Visual Anthropology, the use of pictorial sources in the early modern discourse on religion and the collection history of the textile holdings of the Ethnographic Museum, with a focus on India and Indonesia. She is part of the editorial board of Cromohs—Cyber Review of Modern Historiography and the editor of the Visual Reflections series in the COST Action ‘People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)’, 2019–2023. She has recently coedited (with Cristiana Facchini) Understanding Jesus in the Early Modern Period and Beyond. Across Text and Other Media (Journal for Religion, Film and Media, 2019) and (with Andreas Isler) Gemachte Bilder. Derwische als Orient-Chiffre und Faszinosum (VMZ, 2017). She is the author of Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung: Bernard Picarts Bildtafeln für die ‘Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde’ (Benteli, 2006).