I am a cultural historian of Western Europe in a global context in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, with a focus on the "long" eighteenth century. Much of my work tries to understand what the terms in the previous sentence actually mean.What are the meanings and characteristics of modernity? How distant are we from our "pre-modern" or "early-modern" ancestors? How does “the global” affect European developments during this period? In my work I try to take apart and then put together again some key narratives that the modern west tells about itself.
My first book (
Imagining the Middle Class, 1995) was about the rise of class society and especially the middle class; and the second (
The Making of the Modern Self, 2004), about the emergence of the modern individual or modern self. In both cases I asked where do these narratives come from and what in fact were the historical developments that stood behind them (which were not at all those they claimed to represent). A third narrative which I tried to take apart in a book co-authored with Professor Jonathan Sheehan (University of California-Berkeley), is that of European secularization. The book, titled
Invisible Hands: Self Organization and the Eighteenth Century, asks where does order and harmony come from, in a world where God is no longer believed to take active care of it itself.
Subsequently my work, which had moved from a focus on Britain to much of Europe, especially France, Holland, Venice and Germany, has gravitated to the interface between art and history, asking how to include works of art – visual art and decorative art – in the archive of the historian. This resulted in a book on a mysterious Dutch painter and the print revolution (Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age, 2012), and in a recent book-length interpretation of one of the most extraordinary decorative art works in early modern Europe, that led me from the politics of the Holy Roman Empire through the art of miniaturization to a comparative-religion theories of the global spread of religions and language: The Throne of the Great Mogul in Dresden: The Ultimate Artwork of the Baroque (2023). Currently I am completing a book with Dr. Ray Schrire of Tel Aviv University about an image that was born in an eighteenth-century French painting and ended up as an extraordinarily interesting Meissen figurine; and I’m beginning a new research group, supported by an ISF Breakthrough Grant, on global aspects of early modern absolutism and capitalism with a focus on the study of objects. Recently I have been honored with this kind of work acknowledged with the Rothschild Prize for the Humanities (2026).
In addition, I have a separate interest in the history of Palestine since the eighteenth century, especially y Jerusalem and Jaffa (with a focus on the peculiar history of Jaffa Oranges), and of photography in the Middle East.
Institutionally, I spent many years teaching in the US and the UK, during which I was the associate editor of the American Historical Review (2000-2003), and the founder-director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. In Israel I served as dean of humanities at the Hebrew University (2014-2018) and as president of the Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo (2020-2024).
