Welcome to my website. I am an independent historian of late medieval and Renaissance history and the history of science and technology.
I am working on a book, which is a cultural history of engineering and knowledge in Rome between 1557 and 1590. An early publication on this topic is "Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557-70," Renaissance Quarterly 61 (Winter 2008): 1098-1138.
My latest book is Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400-1600 (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2011). It came out of the Horning Visiting Scholar lectures that I gave at Oregon State in April 2010.
I am co-author and co-editor (with David McGee and Alan M. Stahl) of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). Michael of Rhodes was a mariner who began his career as an oarsman on a Venetian galley and who wrote a book in the 1430s. Our three-volume edition includes a facsimile of the entire manuscript, a transcription of the original Venetian text, an English translation, and a volume of studies by an international group of scholars. It has been awarded the Eugene S. Ferguston Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the J. Franklin Jameson Prize by the American Historical Association.
Michael of Rhodes website Link to Amazon description
I am also a co-author (with Brian Curran, Anthony Grafton, and Benjamin Weiss) of Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
Link to Amazon description
My publications include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in intellectual history published in 2001.
Link to Amazon description
I am the co-editor with Bob Post of the SHOT/AHA booklet series, "Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Cutlure."
SHOT/AHA booklet page - AHA site
SHOT/AHA booklet page - SHOT site
The best way to contact me is by email: