About

I am a historian and digital humanist of religion, gender, and media in early modern Europe and a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Yale University. I am completing my dissertation under the joint supervision of Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, Paul Freedman, and Julia Burkhardt (LMU Munich). I will defend my dissertation in February 2026.

As we struggle with our own age of ideological polarization in a fraught media ecosystem, my work examines a historical period of transformation in both religious ideas and the media through which they circulated. In early modern Europe, the addition of the movable type printing press to a media ecosystem already suffused with overlapping webs of information exchange from handwritten texts to sermons, art, plays, and pub talk amplified debates about belief and behavior and brought them to an ever-wider audience. My work attends to issues of attention, persuasion, and mobilization that remain at the center of discussions about our social media-driven media ecosystem and its social and political consequences.

I research early modern religious history through new digital methods. My dissertation, Life is Taught Better by Examples: Lutheran and Catholic Exempla of Life, Death, and Beyond in Early Modern Europe, examines the exemplary stories meant to shape the mental worlds of ordinary people in the aftermath of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations using a corpus of more than 27,000 pages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed exempla collections I transcribed using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software. Based enhanced search of this transcribed corpus, close reading, and archival research supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), this dissertation transcends traditional confessional, temporal, and geographical boundaries, incorporating work by compilers from the Spanish Netherlands to Upper Hungary across more than 150 years.

My work has appeared in the Sixteenth Century Journal and open access in Religions. My first-authored article “Unlocking the Digitized Archive of Early Modern Print: The Automatic Transcription of Early Modern Printed Books” published in the Sixteenth Century Journal has been featured in a press release by UChicago Press Journals, the only SCJ article featured in a UCP press release since its acquisition of the journal in 2023.

My second project Punishments of the Land will trace early modern religious and intellectual responses to environmental catastrophe. This project will examine how early modern thinkers interpreted extreme heat and cold, fire, flood, famine, and wildlife depredation alongside sky battles and monstrous births as indications of widespread human moral failing and the imminent end of the world.

Contact: serena.strecker@yale.edu