I am Rachel Midura, an Assistant Professor of Digital and Early Modern European History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. I completed my PhD at Stanford University in 2020, where I was a senior graduate research fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. I approach the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and European postal networks. With digital humanities tools, I reconstruct historical relations between objects, people, and places. I design and help manage projects related to the Stanford Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, such as the Early Modern Digital Itineraries and the Grand Tour Projects, which critically examine surviving early modern corpora, increasing accessibility and historical knowledge through digital curation and annotation.

In my first book, Princes of the Post: Power, Publicity, and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe , I explore the development of international postal systems as well as their role in espionage and surveillance.

Please do contact me with any related queries by twitter or institutional email.