Profile
Richard Calis is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University, who specializes in the history of science and intellectual history. Most of his research revolves around questions of cultural exchange, and the forms of globalization that connected different corners of the globe in the early modern period.
His first book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025), will appear this coming January. It traces the life of a now forgotten sixteenth-century individual to explore how early modern scholars, like early ethnographers, studied cultural and religious difference. He is currently developing a second project about the role of dialogue in divided societies, for which he recently received a VENI grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Other research in the making concerns the history of Utrecht University, the history of Botanical Gardens, the role of households in early modern art and science, and a broader collaborative research initiative about archives and power at the Huizinga Institute.
Before coming to Utrecht, he was a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He received his PhD from Princeton University and studied at the University of Amsterdam and the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Tübingen, the University of Oxford, and Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. He loves teaching and always likes to hear from students about their interests and about what they are reading and writing about.
Book:
The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025). Available here.
Key Publications:
"The Lutheran Experience in the Ottoman Middle East: Stephan Gerlach (1546-1612) and the History of Lutheran Accommodation", The English Historical Review (2024): 94-125. Available here.
“The Impossible Reformation: Protestant Europe and Greek Orthodox Church”, Past & Present 259.1 (2023): 43-76. Available here.
"Martin Crusius's Lost Byzantine Legacy", in: Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff (eds.), The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021) 105-142. Available here.
“Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World: Early Modern Ethnography in the Household of Martin Crusius.” Renaissance Quarterly 72.1 (2019): 148-93. Available here. Honorable Mention William Nelson Prize.
“Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730”, Past & Present 241 (2018): 69-141 (with Frederic Clark, Christian Flow, Anthony Grafton, Madeline McMahon, Jennifer Rampling). Available here.
“Building a Digital Bookwheel Together: Annotated Books Online and the History of Early Modern Reading Practices”, Bibliothecae.it III (2014): 63-80 (with Arnoud Visser). Available here.
Other Output:
“At the dawn of Byzantine Studies: Martin Crusius (1526-1607): Interview for ‘Byzantium & Friends’ Podcast.” Available here.
"A New History of Orientalism", Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books (2021). Available here.
Podcast with Pamela Long about her Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago University Press, 2018) for the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. (together with Lilian Datchev). Available here.
“The Winthrops and their Books: A Transatlantic Tale”, The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History (2015; with Madeline McMahon). Available here.
“Two Editors and their Theophrastus”, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (2015). Available here.
“Personal Philology”, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (2015). Available here.
Reviews
William P. Weaver, Homer in Wittenberg: Rhetoric, Scholarship, Prayer (Oxford and New York, 2022). Classical Philology 119.4 (2024): 576-679. Available here.
Andrew L. Thomas, The Apocalypse in Reformation Nuremberg: Jews and Turks in Andreas Osiander's World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022). Central European History 57.2 (2024): 257-259. Available here.
Stefano Villani, Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer was Translated into Italian (Oxford, 2022). Journal of Religious History 48.1 (2024): 90-92. Available here.
Giuseppe Marcocci, The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2020) and Stuart McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World (Cambridge, 2021). Journal of Early Modern History 27 (2023): 255-271. Available here.
Ulrike Strasser, Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys (Amsterdam, 2020). Renaissance Studies 37.1 (2023): 130-132. Available here.
Emily Michelson and Matthew Coneys Wainwright (eds). A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome (Leiden, 2020). Renaissance Quarterly 75.3 (2022). Available here.
Peter Burke, The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New Haven, 2020). English Historical Review 137.585 (2022): 649-651. Available here.
Ulinka Rublack (ed.), Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations (Cambridge, 2020). German History 39.4 (2021): 628-629. Available here.
Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor, Piranesi Unbound (Princeton, 2021). International Journal of the Classical Tradition(2021). Available here.
Robert John Clines, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2019). Mediterranean Historical Review 36.2 (2021): 286-288. Available here.
Floris Verhaart, Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750: Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns (Oxford, 2020). History of Humanities 6.2 (2021): 696-699. Available here.
Luca Scholz, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: 2020). H-Soz Kult Online. Available here.
Karen Hollewand, The Banishment of Beverland. Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden, 2019). Early Modern Low Countries 4.2 (2020): 263-266. Available here.
Hannah Murphy, A New Order of Medicine. The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg (Pittsburgh, 2019). H-Soz Kult Online. Available here.