Doctoral Student in History
About
As an intellectual, book, and legal historian of the early modern Atlantic World, Christian’s research explores the communication networks and social history of print culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing primarily on America, he examines the conversations and debates among writers, their engagement with the press and markets, the social spaces where this rhetoric was articulated, and the political and legal ramifications of these discussions.
In his role as a digital humanities scholar, Christian developed the Penny University Library, designed for both scholarly research and public education. This project served as the foundation for his thesis, “Montesquieu: The Nature of L’Esprit des lois,” where he mapped Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. The Penny University Library features a digitized collection of eighteenth-century books and authors, complemented by a multivariate mapping system that illustrates the book trade.
