Postgraduate Research Director, School of History

Strategic Innovation Lead for Jewish Heritage and Culture

Oren Margolis is a scholar of the Renaissance.  A historian of humanism, of history-writing and antiquarianism, and of the art and culture of the Renaissance book, his interests range from epigraphy to Erasmus.  His work is concerned with bridging gaps: between Italy and the north, between culture and politics, between literary, intellectual, and art history.  He is the author of The Politics of Culture in Quattrocento Europe: René of Anjou in Italy (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Curator of the Bodleian Library exhibition Aldus Manutius: The Struggle and the Dream (2015) on the celebrated scholar-printer of Venice, his new monograph Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher is appearing in Reaktion's Renaissance Lives series in 2023.

Prior to coming to UEA, Oren Margolis taught at Somerville College, Oxford, and was a member of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (Austria).  He has been awarded fellowships at the British School at Rome and at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence).

Oren Margolis teaches broadly in the history of premodern Europe, including the Italian Renaissance in the third year and Latin Palaeography for the MA programme.  He welcomes interdisciplinary work and various methodological approaches, and is happy to hear from prospective graduate students interested in medieval/early modern cultural, intellectual, and literary history, including the classical tradition, historiography, and art and book history, as well as most aspects of Italian history.

BA History and English, University of Southern California (2006)

MA Medieval History, King's College London (2007)

DPhil History, University of Oxford (2011)

Renaissance, history of the book, history of Italy, Jewish history and heritage