Amanda G Madden

Amanda G Madden

Amanda G Madden

Assistant Professor

European History: Digital History, Spatial History. Renaissance and Early Modern Italy, Social History, History of Crime and Violence, Women and Gender, Pedagogy

Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Her resarch areas include digital spatial history, digital humanities, early modern Italy, the history of crime and violence, the history of women and gender, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her book, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (forthcoming Cornell University Press) examines the intersections between factional violence, civic politics, and state formation. Current digital projects include the collaborative spatial history project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1750, and The La Sfera Project which has been funded by the NEH. Her next book project is a spatial history of gender and crime in early modern Italy examining iterative changes in crime and policing, space, and gender; changes which reconfigured the early modern state. 

She is a former Marion L Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in digital pedagogy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Scientist for the Center for 21st Century Universities, and lecturer for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She received her PhD from Emory University in 2011 and her MA in Medieval Studies from The Medieval Institute at Western University in 2005.

Selected Publications

“Peace and the Duel; The Peace in the Duel” Acta Histriae 31 (2023), 689-706.

Madden, Amanda. "Menocchio Mapped: Italian Microhistory and the Digital Spatial Turn". Zoomland: Exploring Scale in Digital History and Humanities, edited by Florentina Armaselu and Andreas Fickers, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024, pp. 77-96. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317779-004

“Introduction: Renaissance Italy and the Digital Humanities,” in Early Modern Digital Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (2022), ed. Amanda Madden. https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v45i2.39765.

“Vendetta Violence and Women’s Legal Agency in Early Modern Italy,” Women’s History Today 3 (December 2021), 23-30.

 “More Than a Just Side Quest: The Non-Gamer's Guide to Using Video Games to Teach Historical Topics.” Sixteenth Century Journal , vol. 50, no. 4, (2019) 1155–1162.

“Requiescat in Pace: The Afterlife of the Borgia in Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood,” in The Fortunes of the Borgia Family, ed. JM DeSilva (Routledge, 2019)

“Hybrid histories: Blending a first-year Composition Course using Assassin’s Creed II” in Blended Learning: A Guide for Researchers and Practitioners eds, Amanda Madden, Lauren Margulieux, Ashok Goel, and Robert Kadel (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 249-68.

“ ‘Una causa civile’: Vendetta Violence and Governing Elites in Early Modern Modena,” in Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe, ed. Jonathan Davies. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 205-224.

Grants and Fellowships

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant for Venetian Studies, 2020

American Historical Association, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant, 2018

Courses Taught

HIST 696: Clio Wired: An Introduction to History and New Media

HIST 388/395/397: True Crime In Early Modern Europe

HIST 680: Intro to Digital Humanities

HIST 388/395 Invisible Histories of the Italian Renaissance

HIST 390: The Digital Past

HIST 615/635/688: Mapping Violence in Early Modern Europe and America

Education

Ph.D, History, Emory University, 2011

M.A., Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 2005

B.A., Humanities, University of Kansas, 2002

Recent Presentations

Invited Keynote Speaker, “Violence and its Control in Early Modern Europe,” York University, UK, July 4-5, 2023.

“Experts in Blood, Experts in Law: Vendetta Violence, Legal Reform, and Reformers in 16th-Century Modena," American Historical Association, Philadelphia, PA, January 5-8

Panel Participant with Mills Kelly, Nate Sleeter, and Celeste Sharpe, “Is there a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Digital History?” 2022 Symposium on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Banff, BC November 10-12.

“Mapping Violence in Early Modern Modena and Verona: A Historical GIS Investigation of Violence, Space, and State Formation,” Spatial Humanities 2022, Ghent, Belgium, Sept. 7-9.

Co-teacher with Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, Gabriel Hankins, Matt Huculak, Sarah-Nelle Jackson, Graham Jensen, “Social Knowledge Creation/Construction” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), online, June 6-10, 2022.

“Roundtable: New Technologies and Renaissance Studies V: New Directions in Digital Humanities and Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Society of America, Dublin, March 30-April 2, 2022.

“Vendetta Violence, Inheritance Practices, and Women’s Legal Agency in Early Modern Italy” New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, FL, March 3-5, 2022.