About

I am an associate professor of History at Indiana University Kokomo. I earned my PhD in History from the University of Rochester, where I worked with Richard Kaeuper. Bill Caferro has been an invaluable mentor in all things Florentine, archival, and military. My research centers on a variety of themes, including: violence, war and society, cultural communities, and tombs and remembrance in medieval and renaissance Italy. My first book, Forged in the Shadow of Mars: Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Florence (Cornell University Press, 2022), focuses on the intersection of chivalry, elite culture, and violence in Due- and Trecento Florence.

My second book project focuses on identity formation among marginalized elites in fourteenth and fifteenth century Florence, a process which involved holding military offices in the contado, providing advice to the Florentine government on military matters, and, perhaps most importantly, cultivating military careers. It will also consider how these men asserted their claimed identities in perpetuity, mainly through the commissioning of tomb effigies and funerary monuments with clear knightly or military themes. While in other parts of Europe these martial activities and acts of commemoration were central pillars of the dominant brand of elite identity, in Florence they were often more closely associated with elites who found themselves at the margins of Florentine politics and economically disadvantaged.