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 Affiliate Faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Her research areas include Renaissance and early modern Italy, digital history, spatial history, 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, 2025) examines the intersections between factional violence, civic politics, and early modern state formation. Current digital projects include the collaborative spatial history project, Modeling and Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1500-1700, 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.
In the Fall of 2024 shw a visiting scholar at the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she worked on the Delmas Foundation-funded project, "Mapping Urban Violence in Venice and the Terraferma, 1500-1700." She will be a faculty fellow at the Center for Humanities Research, GMU, in Fall of 2025 to work on her next book.
Selected Publications
“Mapping Taxonomies of Hatred: The Spaces of Hostility in Early Modern Venice and Bologna" (under consideration)
The Violent Early Modern: New Approaches, eds. Amanda Madden, Colin Rose, (Routledge, forthcoming)
“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
CHSS, Faculty Research and Development Grant, 2025-26
American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant, 2025-26.
4VA Grant with Virginia Tech, 2024-2025
NEH, Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, 2023-2024
SSHRC Connections Grant, Co-directors, Nicholas Terpstra, Colin Rose
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant for Venetian Studies, 2020, 2024
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
“Violence in Private and Public: Gender, Violence, and Space in Early Modern Venice and the Veneto,” Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 22-24, 2025.
Invited Institute Lecture, Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), University of Victoria, 2024, June 3-7
Honorary Wikipedian Lecture, Electronic Texts and Culture Lab (ETCL), University of British Columbia, November 9, 2024
Workshop on GIS, co-taught with Colin Rose, Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, March 21-23
“After the Feud? Dispute Settlement Between Custom and Law in Early Modern Europe,” Online conference, June 21-22.
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.