Dr. Ian Hathaway

I am a historian of the early modern Mediterranean, specializing in mobility, diplomacy, and cross-cultural interactions. I am currently conducting research and writing to complete my first monograph titled “Patenting Power: Travel, Diplomacy, and Coexistence in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean”. This book project builds on my dissertation research on sixteenth-century mobility practices, in which I conducted a comparative study of thousands of portable travel instruments (patent letters and other letter types). Ultimately, the project argues that, though shared and recognizable mobility instruments certainly existed across the Mediterranean region, constant acts of micro diplomacy reshaped the role of these institutions continuously.

Besides my current research, I am also engaged in various historical public outreach projects. These include the podcast series Experiencing Epidemics and the development of a medieval tabletop role-playing game titled Il Tempo della Spada, soon to be published in Italy. These two projects channel a fundamental belief of mine: storytelling and, in the second case, play can be fundamental pedagogic tools capable of drawing people into a world of historical complexities that might remain otherwise obscure to them.