Research Impact

• UChicago Press Journals’ press release for “Unlocking the Digitized Archive of Early Modern Print” in the Sixteenth Century Journal, the only SCJ article featured in a UCP press release since its acquisition of the journal in 2023
• Editors’ Introduction to the summer 2025 issue of the Sixteenth Century Journal:

  The editors of SCJ thought that the practical implications of this article were so important, and the technology is changing so fast, that we added another article to our usual number to publish it in this issue. Strecker and Lifton emphasize that early modern scholars themselves should decide how labor and technology involving HTR are combined to avoid unethical labor practices. We know that many readers of SCJ may choose to be part of this decision process or those that involve other new technologies, and welcome other submissions that reflect on practical or ethical matters surrounding digital tools available to early modern scholars.

• “Confessional Cross-Pollination: Basel Humanists as Suppliers of Lutheran and Catholic Exempla” published in Religions is available open access and has been viewed online more than 1,500 times (as of 7/21/25)

Dissertation

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both Lutheran and Catholic preachers believed that their parishioners needed examples, good and bad, of how to live and how to die, in order for them to triangulate how they should behave and what they should believe. Both Lutheran and Catholic preachers excerpted paragraph-long exempla from classical, medieval, and contemporary sources and organized them into standalone volumes. These exempla collections supplied lay people with entertaining, edifying reading and fellow preachers with riveting tales for their sermons. Because preachers understood exempla to be particularly effective for persuading ordinary people, my dissertation, Life is Taught Better by Examples: Lutheran and Catholic Exempla of Life, Death, and Beyond in Early Modern Europe, focuses on advice presented in exempla for each stage of life.

Until now, the sheer quantity of discrete narratives has made a comparative study of both confessions unfeasible. Using new digital humanities methods, I constructed a computationally addressable corpus of twenty-one exempla collections published between 1568 and 1724, totaling 27,807 pages or 12.7 million tokens. Combining enhanced keyword searches in this corpus with more traditional 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 French-speaking Spanish Netherlands to German-speaking Upper Hungary across more than 150 years. By applying traditional and digital methods to narrative sources, this dissertation borrows from and speaks to disciplines as varied as media studies, literature, folklore studies, and medieval and early modern studies, as well as Germanic studies, classics, and computational linguistics.

I argue that that the interconnectedness of the early modern media ecosystem and the need to practically address each stage of an ordinary life, from the womb to the afterlife, led Lutheran and Catholic exempla compilers to converge in much of the practical advice they circulated to their broader communities. This dissertation shows that early modern Lutheran and Catholic religious communication was more similar than previously accounted for, disrupting long-held narratives of polemic and conflict. My work revises the triumphalist picture of Lutheran media innovation and domination in the sixteenth century to embrace more continuity, cross-pollination, and connection between confessions. By focusing on the stages of an ordinary life, this dissertation examines topics relevant to the study of early modern gender—pregnancy, marriage, and parenthood—through these new sources. My article, “‘The Man Remained a Sow,’” presently under submission at a history journal, extends the dissertation’s treatment of gendered marital violence exempla by integrating insights from the study of violence in the transatlantic slave trade to argue that historians of early modern religion must approach these sources with active, emotive engagement rather than a posture of attempted objectivity.

Published Articles

My published work aims to make new digital methods accessible to scholars of early modern history. In “Confessional Cross-Pollination” (Religions), I introduce the method I developed for navigating my large corpus using the concordance software AntConc to reveal the role of Reformed authors in Basel as mediators of narrative material between opposing confessions. In my first-authored article “Unlocking the Digitized Archive of Early Modern Print” (Sixteenth Century Journal), I demonstrate an innovative approach to creating highly accurate transcriptions from digitized early modern printed texts using methods I developed while training and testing Handwritten Text Recognition software for my dissertation corpus. I outline a workflow that challenges the unethical outsourcing of transcription labor by equipping individual researchers to build large, computer-searchable corpora themselves. I argue that early modernists across disciplines must collectively decide how labor and new digital tools are combined to avoid unethical labor practices.

Second Project

My second project, Punishments of the Land, traces early modern religious and intellectual responses to environmental catastrophe. This project examines 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 moral failing and the imminent end of the world. While much literature on early modern natural disaster centers secular authorities’ logistical responses, this study foregrounds intellectual and popular understandings of what it meant to be in a world of constant environmental catastrophe. My research has brought me into conversation with environmental historians Jérémie Foa (Marseille) and Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld) and into contact with a wide range of relevant sources describing disaster in Europe and around the world from chronicles to treatises, sermons, and pamphlets. As we consider corporations’, governments’, and consumers’ contributions to climate change today and begin to reformulate climate-driven catastrophes not as “acts of God” but as consequences of global capitalism, we can gain insight from our early modern European counterparts who interpreted similar catastrophes as a direct result of their individual and communal moral failings.