Doctoral Student in History
About
Christian Murray is a second-year PhD student in history at the University of Michigan, where his research spans the intellectual, legal, and cultural history of speculation in the early modern Atlantic world. His work examines how ideas about hope, risk, profit, and human behavior shaped, and were shaped by, emerging financial networks, legal frameworks, and the symbolic worlds of early modern life.
In his role as a digital humanities scholar at the University of Mississippi, 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.
Fields of Study
Early Modern Atlantic World · U.S. Intellectual History to 1865 · Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century European Cultural History
