If the professoriate is your true calling, reality dictates that you go where the openings are, rather than where you wish to be. My experience of the job market was a continental compass tour: As a graduate student, the process landed me at campus visits in Virginia and Texas, and later, as a postdoctoral fellow, in Utah and Vermont. I was quite happy in my postdoctoral position, researching and teaching in New Jersey, and I did not have to leave. I, however, had the rare opportunity to go somewhere I wanted to be. When the offer came from Middlebury College, I did not hesitate.
I am a product of large research institutions. My studies took me from the University of Toronto, where I was an undergraduate student, to the University of Cambridge and Yale University, where I completed my graduate studies, and finally to Princeton University, where I was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer. Over thirteen years, I learned the historian’s craft and became a specialist on early modern Europe. In the process, I discovered the deep satisfaction of carving out a tiny corner of the past and making it intimately my own.
I will always find profound satisfaction in the archives — in uncovering how technological artifacts shaped everyday life in early modern cities, and in advancing research into material and spatial histories. Take, for instance, the carriage. To most people, these passenger vehicles — popularized in mid-seventeenth-century Europe — are relics of conspicuous consumption. When I discussed the carriage with students in the past, it was clear they believed early vehicular technology (not all technology is digital, if you can imagine!) had no bearing on their lives. It is precisely this initial skepticism, I would tell them, that illuminates the purpose of humanistic inquiry: to read the world — past and present — not just for contradictions and silences, but for the meanings these gaps reveal.
Why do we configure roads between two sidewalks? Why do we place so much emphasis on the impact of automobiles in reconfiguring urban life? A key logic of city space that we use every day is, in part, a result of the introduction of the carriage. Seventeenth-century driving parks like Paris’s Cours-la-Reine (Queen’s Promenade) gave rise to a tripartite division of space — a center lane for wheeled traffic flanked by space for foot traffic. This spatial logic was transplanted to the city’s boulevards beginning in the 1670s and can be found in built environments around the world to this day. The way we navigate and read cities is, therefore, shaped by early modern moments — when people were learning, both physically and socially, how to accept and integrate new modes of urban movement into the everyday.
A result of discussions like this has meant that over time, the classroom has exerted a strong gravity on me. Reinforcing the full, elegant architecture of humanistic studies has thus become a force equally as compelling as the research itself. This is why I chose to become a part of a liberal arts college. In the brief span of four weeks, I have come to delight in the classroom as the crucible of intellectual vitality and self-cultivation — an arena where students and professors engage together in the shared pleasure of contemplation. Teaching, whether a lecture or a seminar, does not feel like stepping away from my research; it feels like returning to its very source.
In every encounter, I challenge my students to stretch the bounds of their creativity and to think with fresh, unaccustomed rigor. They return the favor with questions that surprise me, unsettle me and sometimes undo what I thought I had already settled. They have brought forward historical actors, events and objects I had shelved in the back rooms of my mind — overlooked, perhaps, while I was consumed with other lines of inquiry. Now, once-forgotten fragments are resurfacing, staging a quiet rebellion. Charged with new meaning, they compel me to rethink what I thought I knew and confront the assumptions woven into my own discoveries.
Middlebury has confirmed that I am exactly where I belong. My intellectual anchor need not be the grand machinery of the research university; it can rest instead in the enduring, quiet tradition of the liberal arts. The intimacy of our classrooms is, in its way, a sacred space — a site where conversation stretches across time, and historical actors are welcomed not merely as subjects of study, but as interlocutors. Together, we explore a world at once deeply foreign and strangely resonant, and, in the process, witness how meaning is made. We learn to interpret the past with the awareness that our work requires both intellectual precision and a responsibility to resist utility in its narrowest sense. We do not gather here to train for a specific job. Rather, we have the privilege of committing to the study of history to cultivate judgment, deepen our sensitivity toward one another and engage with the human condition across time and place.
There is laughter in our classrooms. There is confusion, and there are silences — moments when no one quite knows what to say. But there is also energy, courage and curiosity. This is why I came to Middlebury. Not because it was the logical step, but because it offered the conditions and possibilities under which deep thinking, meaningful teaching and intellectual risk-taking are not only possible — but embraced.
In 1486, the Italian scholar Pico della Mirandola composed his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. “Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature,” he explained. At stake in Pico’s text was a powerful, emerging thought: that the ability to change oneself and one’s world is anchored in free will. Pico’s text was limited to the sociocultural milieu to which he himself belonged: the noble elite. His work is a product of Renaissance Humanism — an intellectual and male-dominated movement. However, the profound truth of his argument has lived on beyond those limitations. To preside over that text — as a woman, before a class comprising whole worlds Pico never knew — is to treat the discourse not as a static artifact of Renaissance thought, but as a living, breathing blueprint for the deep, individual work of self-creation now available to all.
Our classroom, in this light, becomes the definitive measure of the text’s resilience: a testament to the idea that free will belongs not to the humanist elite, but to all, and our discourse is so very powerful. The liberal arts classroom, in its embrace of open-ended inquiry and self-directed study, becomes the space where students, constrained by no fixed destiny, are challenged to ordain for themselves the limits of their own nature.
In a world obsessed with automation and optimization, it may seem fanciful — even inefficient — to build a life around small discussions of ideas that are hundreds of years old. But I have never found anything more exhilarating. The drive is over, and I have arrived.
