Rachel Midura, Ph.D.

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Digital and Early Modern European History at Virginia Tech. I finished my PhD in 2020 at Stanford University, where I was a senior graduate fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. In my research, I approach the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and the European postal network. I revisit traditional social, cultural and material historical approaches to incorporate twenty-first century understanding of media and social networks. I read across the vast digitization projects of recent years to synthesize new historical models for communication. I am dedicated to increasing the accessibility of historical knowledge through digital curation and annotation.