Madeline McMahon – I am a Ph.D. candidate studying the intellectual, religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. My dissertation, “Shepherding a Church in Crisis: Religious Life, Governance, and Knowledge in Early Modern Italy,” examines the contested nature and role of bishops in the Catholic Church in Italy after the Council of Trent.
I entered the program in 2015. In 2016-17 I co-organized the Committee for the Study of Books and Media (CSBM) talk series with Stephanie Pope. I was a co-founding co-editor of JHIBlog, the blog for the Journal of the History of Ideas, through 2016. With Frederic Clark and Erin Schreiner, I co-curated the exhibit, Readers Make Their Mark: Annotated Books at the New York Society Library (2015). Continuing my interest in marginalia, I am a member of the Winthrop Project here at Princeton, where I work on almanacs, religious diaries, and barrels of books on the move.
I received my B.A. from Princeton in 2013. I studied classics at Columbia University (2013-14) and early modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar (2014-15). In 2017-18, I was based at the Università di Bologna in order to pursue research on my dissertation as a Fulbright doctoral grantee. In 2018 and 2019, I was a visiting researcher at Harvard University, first as a fellow at the Houghton Library and later as an exchange scholar in the history department.
