PhD 1995 University of California, Los Angeles
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Ottoman history, history of the early Turkish republic, modern Middle East history, nationalism, intellectual history
PhD 1989 University of Amsterdam
FIELD SPECIALTIES
History of Christianity and Christian thought; Western medieval and the early Christian intellectual tradition; continuity of Platonic themes
PhD 2003 University of Chicago
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Social and cultural history of modern South Asia
PhD 2007 (history) Harvard University
JD 1999 Yale University
AB 1996 (history) Yale University
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Legal history, federalism, constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, and law and literature
NEWS
—Discusses Chicago's approach to teaching legal history
PhD 1982 University of California, Berkeley
FIELD SPECIALTIES
The American South, slavery, US social history, American labor history, urban history
BIOGRAPHY
Jim moved to the AHA in 2010 from the Newberry Library, where he was vice president for research and education. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Chicago.
He is the author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929 (Oxford University Press, 1997). He was project director and coeditor with Janice L. Reiff and Ann Durkin Keating of The Encyclopedia of Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and coeditor with Janice L. Reiff and Ann Durkin Keating of The Encyclopedia of Chicago Online. He is the editor of The Frontier in American Culture(University of California Press, 1994) and coeditor of the series, Historical Studies of Urban America (University of Chicago Press, 1992–present). His articles and short essays have focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, and American ethnicity. His book reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and New York Newsday in addition to various academic journals. A frequent participant in the Chicago Humanities Festival, he has also spoken at the Printers Row Book Fair, and a wide variety of universities and cultural institutions locally and nationwide.
Land of Hope received awards from the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights and the Illinois State Historical Society. A Chance to Make Good won awards from the New York Public Library and the National Council for the Social Studies. The Encyclopedia of Chicago won awards from the Scholarly Publishers Division of the Association of American Publishers and the Illinois State Historical Society. Grossman was chosen in 2005 as one of seven "Chicagoans of the Year" by Chicago Magazine.
Grossman was responsible for the Newberry's research centers, fellowship programs, educational initiatives, and public programs. His consulting experience includes a broad variety of history-related projects (mostly films, exhibits, and research projects) by the BBC, the Smithsonian, the Goodman Theater, the Field Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Public Library, the American Social History Project, Blackside, and a variety of independent film producers.
Professional service has included elected offices in the American Historical Association, professional ethics committees for the AHA and the Organization of American Historians, and advisory boards for the AHA, the Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University, the National History Center, the Illinois Historical Society, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Chicago Public Library. He also has served as chair of the Board of the Chicago Metro History Education Center and President of the Hyde Park Soccer Club. He cochaired the Program Committee for the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in 2005.
PhD 2004 Princeton University
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Iraqi history, the history of Iraqi Jews, the Arab cultural revival movement (the nahda) in the late 19th century, the connections between modern Arab history and Arabic literature
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Medieval Italian Architecture and Urbanism, Historical Soundscapes, Early Modern Travel in the Mediterranean, Digital Humanities and Historical Mapping, Environmental Histories of Early Modern Italy
BIOGRAPHY
Niall Atkinson is Associate Professor of Art History and Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the experience of architecture and urban space in early modern Italy in order to understand the build environment as a collective social construction of the body’s sensorial apparatus. His recent work has explored the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of civic society, culminating in the publication of The Noisy Renaissance: sound, architecture, and Florentine urban life (Penn State, 2016). He is currently co-writing a book on the urban visual and spatial effects of the narratives and itineraries of French travelers to early modern Rome (with Susanna Caviglia, Duke University). He is also experimenting with digital technologies to spatialize the demographic data contained in the 1427 tax census of Florence (catasto) into an interactive geographic platform. In collaboration with a consortium of related digital reconstruction projects focused on Renaissance Florence (Florentia Illustrata), this method of geo-referenced spatial history will lay the groundwork for future experiments in mapping the soundscapes and other sensory experiences of early modern cities. Future projects include the role of city descriptions in mediating cultural exchange in early modern Mediterranean travel accounts, as well as an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative project exploring the cultural interactions of the Indian Ocean (“Interwoven: Sonic, visual and textual histories of the Indian Ocean world”). In 2018, he co-curated the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale on the theme, “Dimensions of Citizenship.”
Recent Research / Recent Publications
The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), “Early Modern Rome on the Move: Ecological Contradictions in the Representation of a Reemerging City,” With Susanna Caviglia, RES 77-78 (2023)
“Neighborhood demographics at the Foundation of the Innocenti: a Test Case in Mapping the Florentine Catasto of 1427,” with Carmen Caswell, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (2023): 165-197
Florence, 1494: Politics in Motion in the Streets of Florence,” Journal of Early Modern History, 25, 1-2, (March 2021): 61-95
“Taking Architectural Theory on the Road: The Sliding Scales of the Florentine Traveler, in Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives. Nicholas Baker and Brian J. Maxon, eds. Routledge, 2019
“Making Sense of Rome in the Eighteenth-Century: Walking and the French Aesthetic Imagination” (with Susanna Caviglia), Word and Image 34, no 3 (Sept 2018): 216-36.
“Getting Lost in the Italian Renaissance,” I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance 19, 1 (2016), 1-30
“Seeing Sound: Mapping the Florentine Soundscape,” Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modem City, eds. Nicholas Terpstra, Colin Rose (Routledge, 2016), 149-68
“Thinking Through Noise, Building Toward Silence: Creating a Sound Mind and Sound Architecture in the Premodern City,” Grey Room 60 (2015): 10-35
Florentia Illustrata: Spatializing History and Visualizing Experience in the Renaissance City | Digital collaboration consortium (Villa I Tatti)
digital CATASTO: City, Architecture, & Technology Aligning in Space and Time Online | with Carmen Caswell (University of Chicago)
INTERWOVEN: Sonic & Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean | with Philip Bohlman, James Nye, Laura Ring, Anna Schultz, Anna Seastrand | Interwoven: Sonic & Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean
Sawyer Seminar, The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum, Michael Faciejew, Katie Colored, Yale University, May 2022
“TO MAKE VISIBLE THE STRUCTURES”: CHALLENGING THE CANON, DIGITAL AND BEYOND, WITH NIALL ATKINSON AND MIN KYUNG LEE, In the Foreground; Conversations on Art & Writing, Clark Institut miniseries hosted by Caitlin Woolsey, February 2022.
Challenging-the-Canon “TO SEE THE EFFECTS OF SOUND”: NIALL ATKINSON ON ACOUSTIC TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE EARLY MODERN, In the Foreground; Conversations on Art & Writing, Clark Institut miniseries hosted by Caitlin Woolsey, November 2021.
PhD 1994 University of Toronto
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Early medieval cultures, literatures, and societies, medieval historical writing, books, script, and learning in medieval Europe, the role of women in medieval education, Latin paleography
PhD 1976 Jawaharlal Nehru University
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Urdu and Indian Persian literature, history of late medieval and early modern northern India