Introducing: Jeffrey Fynn-Paul
This summer, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul started as a lecturer at the Institute's Social and Economic History section.
"I was born in Florida, USA, and raised in the historic university town of Bethlehem, PA, not far from Philadelphia and New York. I received a BA in History and Political Science from Lehigh University; a year of my undergraduate training was undertaken at York University in the UK. After two additional years spent traveling around Europe and Mexico, I went to Toronto, Canada, to begin graduate studies in Medieval History. I began to work with Mark Meyerson and John Munro, and learned also from Walter Goffart and Paul Grendler, amongst others associated with the Centres for Medieval and Reformation Studies.
Having received a PhD from Toronto in 2005, I taught at the University of Hartford for two years, before receiving an invitation to move, family in tow, to Utrecht to work on early modern financial history with Oscar Gelderblom. I next worked on early modern military-financial history with Hugo Soly and Marjolein ‘t Hart, for which I transferred to Brussels.
My specialty is late medieval and early modern urban history, particularly the causal relationships between urban institutions and economic change. I have finished a data-rich book MS on the urban history of late medieval Spain, which is currently under review. Several publications on the interaction of economy, politics, and society in the urban milieu of the late medieval Mediterranean have been published or are in the pipeline. I have also done some work on the economic dimensions of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe, which has appeared in the Journal of Medieval History and Past & Present. I am currently editing a volume for Brill entitled War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300-1800, which is due out late next year.
I am very excited to join the Institute’s Social and Economic History section as a lecturer. I am offering several courses, ranging from first-year to MA. level, on different aspects of early modern economic history and globalization, plus Statistics for Historians. I hope also to develop a project based on the role of urban institutions in creating ‘useful knowledge’ in Europe during the late medieval and early modern periods."