Education
B.A. Harvard University (2007)
M.Phil. University of Cambridge (2008)
M.A. Princeton University (2010)
Ph.D. Princeton University, History (2014)
Courses
- HIST 135 SEM The Coffeehouse from Arabia to the Enlightenment (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 226 LEC Early Modern Europe (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 301 SEM Approaching the Past: The Historian’s Task (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 330 SEM Reformations: Faith, Politics, and the World (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 331 SEM European Intellectual History from Aquinas to Kant (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 341 SEM The European Enlightenment (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 492 TUT Making Race in Early Modern Europe (not offered 2026/27)
More Information
Biography
Alexander Bevilacqua, Associate Professor of History, teaches early modern Europe (ca. 1450 to 1800). He studies the history of Europe from Renaissance to Enlightenment, focusing in particular on global interactions and their cultural and intellectual ramifications.
Bevilacqua is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (2018; paperback 2020). He also co-edited Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (2019). His current book project, The Mask of Battle: European Chivalry in the Age of Discovery, under contract with Harvard University Press, examines the impact of chivalry on European imaginings of the world beyond Europe. An excerpt from this research appeared in 2024 in the journal Past and Present.
His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in History of European Ideas, Isis, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, Journal of Modern History, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past and Present. He was educated at Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Princeton University, from which he received his doctorate in 2014. From 2014 until 2017 he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Bevilacqua’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, the Folger Institute, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Society for French Historical Studies. He has held fellowships at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Huntington Library, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Bevilacqua serves as an executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and welcomes inquiries from scholars considering a submission.
Selected Publications
Books
The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. Paperback 2020.
Recognition: Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. Shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Prize.
Translations: Arabic (Jarrous Press, 2019); Italian (Ulrico Hoepli Editore, 2019); Turkish (Yeditepe Basim Yayin Dagitim, 2020); Korean (Marco Polo Press, forthcoming).
Read an excerpt | Listen to a podcast: Ottoman History Podcast; New Books in History.
(w. F. Clark) Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Translations: Traditional Chinese (The Commercial Press, 2021); Simplified Chinese (Peking University Press, forthcoming).
Articles (Selected)
“Typographia Botanica: Printing Nature in the Age of Linnaeus.” Isis. Forthcoming in December 2026.
“Race-Making Festivities in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1652-1750.” Past and Present, no. 265 (November 2024): 3–56.
“A Dragoman and a Scholar: French Knowledge-Making in the Mediterranean from Old Regime to Bonaparte.” Journal of Modern History 94 (2022): 247–287.
(w. J. Loop) “The Qur’an in Comparison and the Birth of ‘scriptures.’” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 20 (2018): 148–173.
“How to Organise the Orient: D’Herbelot and the Bibliothèque Orientale.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79 (2016): 213–261.
“The Qur’an Translations of Marracci and Sale.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013): 93–130.
(w. H. Pfeifer) “Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750.” Past and Present, no. 221 (2013): 75–118.
“Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots.” History of European Ideas 38 (2012): 550–569.
Public Writing
“We need a better plan,” London Review of Books, 5 March 2026.
“Lost Illusions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2026.
“Who is a Jew?,” London Review of Books, 10 July 2025.
“Can we speak Greek?,” London Review of Books, 3 April 2025.
“Saints for Supper,” London Review of Books, 26 December 2024.
“Not a Prophet,” London Review of Books, 19 July 2024.
“Friend or Food?,” London Review of Books, 14 December 2023.
“Lost in Leipzig,” London Review of Books, 29 June 2023.
“The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture,” Aeon, 15 January 2019.
Theses Advised
John Michael Aste ’25 – “Since You Know How to Paint Speech:” Indigenous Voices and Jesuit Writing in Seventeenth-Century New France. Winner of the Russell H. Bostert Prize for best thesis in American History and of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in History.
Phoebe Price ’25 (Art History) – ‘Dalla Mano del Principe’: The Alchemy of Francesco I de’ Medici’s Hard Stones and the Art of Imitation. Winner of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in Art History and of the Cambridge Early Modern Science and Medicine Essay Prize 2025, awarded by the journal Early Science and Medicine and the History of Science Society.
Asher Gladstone ’24 – Living Rabbis and their Christian Readers: Jewish Readmission and Interreligious Exchange in Seventeenth-Century England. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History. Published as “Imagining an English Synagogue: Anglo-Christian Knowledge of Jewish Custom on the Eve of Readmission, 1616–1664,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 11 (2026): 1-31.
(w. Karen Merrill) Dover Sikes ’24 – A Scholar’s Duty in the Age of Removal: The American Colonization Society at Williams College (1816-1836). Winner of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in History.
Jackson T. Hartigan ’23 – “There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days:” The Natural History of the Human Body in the British Enlightenment. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History and of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for Graduate Study in History.
Ben Weinstein ’22 – The World of a Company Scholar: Tracing “Connections” in India in the Late Eighteenth Century.
William Abersek ’21 – “All that perchance shall e’er be known:” William Hunter’s Eighteenth-Century Collection of Medieval Manuscripts. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.
Hannah Tager ’20 – Little Fools and Visionaries: Converso Children on Trial During the Spanish Inquisition. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.
Kevin Silverman ’20 – “The Truth, Always the Truth and Nothing More Than the Truth”: Reimagining Spanish History After the Disaster of 1898.
Rebecca Van Pamel ’19 – “The End is Near, the Turks are Here”: Instrumentalized History and the Politics of Siege Commemoration in 1883 Vienna. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.