Faculty Profile
- Rothman, E. Natalie, Ph.D. Michigan
- Associate Professor, UTSC
- rothman@utsc.utoronto.ca
- Office: UTSC H518 & SS 2060
Field: Early modern socio-cultural history, Mediterranean history, historical anthropology, translation history, Venice, Ottoman Empire.
E. Natalie Rothman is a historical anthropologist specializing in the history of the Mediterranean in the early modern period, practices of cultural mediation and the relationship between translation and empire. She is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Rothman’s first book, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011), explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book received the 2012 Herbert Baxter Adams prize for best first book in European History and the Howard R. Marraro prize for best book in Italian history, both from the American Historical Association, as well as the 2013 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Prize for best book in Renaissance Venetian Studies from the Renaissance Society of America. Rothman’s articles have appeared in Mediterranean Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Quaderni Storici, the Journal of Ottoman Studies, and elsewhere. Rothman continues to examine the history of cultural mediation, the genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire in her current book project, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant. Her research has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library, a Jackman Humanities Fellowship at the University of Toronto, and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government. Rothman teaches graduate seminars and supervises MA and PhD theses in the general areas of Mediterranean history, translation history, and historical anthropology. She is also the Principal Investigator behind Serai, a digital collaboratory for scholarship on premodern encounters, and is keenly interested in digital scholarship and pedagogy.