Lillian Datchev

Biography

Lillian Datchev is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Center for Humanities. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval and early modern Europe. Her research focuses on the histories of knowledge, material culture, and early capitalism, particularly in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

Before joining the Center for Humanities, she held a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and was a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

She received her B.A. in Philosophy and History of Mathematics and Science from St. John’s College, Annapolis (2013), M.A. in Cultural and Intellectual History, 1300–1650 from The Warburg Institute (2016), and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2024).

Current Projects

Datchev’s current book project is on the rise of antiquarian scholarship in Europe. It investigates how and why humanists began to study ancient artifacts systematically from the fifteenth century on. It shows how this scholarly movement originated in cultural traditions that first developed in mercantile communities in the Italian colonies and commercial outposts in the Adriatic and Aegean regions. Her second book project is on merchant culture in Renaissance Europe more generally.

Publications

Articles & Book Chapters

“Ciriaco d’Ancona and the Origins of Epigraphy,” Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023), 1-53.