Alexander Bevilacqua

Biography

Alexander Bevilacqua, Associate Professor of History, teaches early modern Europe (ca. 1450 to 1800). He studies the history of Europe from Renaissance to Enlightenment, focusing in particular on global interactions and their cultural and intellectual ramifications.

Bevilacqua is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (2018; paperback 2020). He also co-edited Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (2019). His current book project, The Face of Battle: Chivalry and the Racial Imagination, investigates the performance of human difference at European princely courts. An excerpt from this research appeared in November 2024 in Past and Present.

His articles have appeared in History of European Ideas, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, Journal of Modern History, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past and Present. He was educated at Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Princeton University, from which he received his doctorate in 2014. From 2014 until 2017 he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Bevilacqua’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, the Folger Institute, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Society for French Historical Studies. He has held fellowships at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Huntington Library, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

Selected Publications

Books

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. Paperback 2020.

Recognition: Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. Shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Prize.

Translations: Arabic (Jarrous Press, 2019); Italian (Ulrico Hoepli Editore, 2019); Turkish (Yeditepe Basim Yayin Dagitim, 2020); Korean (Marco Polo Press, forthcoming).

Read an excerpt | Read an interview | Listen to a podcast: Ottoman History Podcast; New Books in History.

(w. F. Clark) Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Translations: Traditional Chinese (The Commercial Press, 2021); Simplified Chinese (Peking University Press, forthcoming).

Articles

“Race-Making Festivities in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1652-1750.” Past and Present, no. 265 (November 2024): 3–56.

“A Dragoman and a Scholar: French Knowledge-Making in the Mediterranean from Old Regime to Bonaparte.” Journal of Modern History 94 (2022): 247–287.

(w. J. Loop) “The Qur’an in Comparison and the Birth of ‘scriptures.’” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 20 (2018): 148–173.

“How to Organise the Orient: D’Herbelot and the Bibliothèque Orientale.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79 (2016): 213–261.

“The Qur’an Translations of Marracci and Sale.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013): 93–130.

(w. H. Pfeifer) “Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750.” Past and Present, no. 221 (2013): 75–118.

“Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots.” History of European Ideas 38 (2012): 550–569.

Public Writing

“Can we speak Greek?,” London Review of Books, 3 April 2025.

“Saints for Supper,” London Review of Books, 26 December 2024.

“Not a Prophet,” London Review of Books, 19 July 2024.

“Friend or Food?,” London Review of Books, 14 December 2023.

“Lost in Leipzig,” London Review of Books, 29 June 2023.

“The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture,” Aeon, 15 January 2019.

Theses Advised

John Michael Aste ’25 – “Since You Know How to Paint Speech:” Indigenous Voices and Jesuit Writing in Seventeenth-Century New France. Winner of the Russell H. Bostert Prize for best thesis in American History and of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in History.

Phoebe Price ’25 (Art History) – ‘Dalla Mano del Principe’: The Alchemy of Francesco I de’ Medici’s Hard Stones and the Art of Imitation. Winner of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in Art History.

Asher Gladstone ’24 – Living Rabbis and their Christian Readers: Jewish Readmission and Interreligious Exchange in Seventeenth-Century England. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.

(w. Karen Merrill) Dover Sikes ’24 – A Scholar’s Duty in the Age of Removal: The American Colonization Society at Williams College (1816-1836). Winner of the Arthur B. Graves Prize in History.

Jackson T. Hartigan ’23 – “There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days:” The Natural History of the Human Body in the British Enlightenment. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History and of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for Graduate Study in History.

Ben Weinstein ’22 – The World of a Company Scholar: Tracing “Connections” in India in the Late Eighteenth Century.

William Abersek ’21 – “All that perchance shall e’er be known:” William Hunter’s Eighteenth-Century Collection of Medieval Manuscripts. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.

Hannah Tager ’20 – Little Fools and Visionaries: Converso Children on Trial During the Spanish Inquisition. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.

Kevin Silverman ’20 – “The Truth, Always the Truth and Nothing More Than the Truth”: Reimagining Spanish History After the Disaster of 1898.

Rebecca Van Pamel ’19 – “The End is Near, the Turks are Here”: Instrumentalized History and the Politics of Siege Commemoration in 1883 Vienna. Winner of the Robert C. L. Scott Prize for the best thesis in U.S. or European History.