Dr Richard Calis

I am a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College working on the cultural, religious and intellectual history of the early modern world. My first book project, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (1526-1607), reveals how three fields of inquiry now often studied separately—the Lutheran Reformation, the early modern Mediterranean, and the history of cultural encounter—were once a single arena of experience and investigation. My second book project recovers the work of 17th-century Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans who proselytized in the Middle East through diplomacy, scholarship, and empire while also incorporating the perspectives of Eastern Christians who resisted European evangelizing. 

My research has been generously supported by, amongst others, the Renaissance Society of America, the Bibliographical Society of America, the DAAD, the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, a Josephine de Karman Fellowship and Princeton University's Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship. I was also the recipient of the 2021 German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Prize for the best dissertation in German History written at a North American university.

Before coming to Cambridge, I received an MA and PhD from Princeton University and and a BA and MA from the University of Amsterdam. I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Tübingen (2017, 2019), the Descartes Centre of Utrecht University (2017), the University of Oxford (2018), and the Vossius Center of the University of Amsterdam (2020). I have taught at the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton, and Utrecht.