University of Toronto

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor

UTSC

About

E. Natalie Rothman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in the history of Venice and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Her broader interests include the history of cultural mediation and the relationship between translation and empire. She was trained as an historical anthropologist, first at Tel Aviv University (MA in Culture Research, summa cum laude, 1999) and then at the University of Michigan (PhD in Anthropology and History, 2006). Her 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. Rothman's articles have appeared in Mediterranean Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and elsewhere. She continues to examine the intersecting histories of early modern trans-imperial subjects in her new project, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant, which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library. Her courses focus on the early modern Mediterranean, the history of Venice and its empire, and on translators and interpreters, converts and missionaries, and travellers and travel-writers.

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