Madeline McMahon
Ph.D., History, Princeton University
Postdoctoral Fellow
Contact
- E-mail: m.mcmahon@utexas.edu
- Office: GAR 0.134
Biography
Madeline McMahon (pronounced: 'mik-MAN') is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on intellectual, cultural, and religious history of early modern Europe (ca. 1450 – 1800).
McMahon’s book in progress, The Creation of Catholic Knowledge in Early Modern Italy: Bishops, Their Households, and Diocesan Work, explores the work of bishops’ “scientific” households during the Catholic Reformation in Italy. Drawing on ongoing work in the history of science, the book focuses on bishops’ and bishops’ employees’ practices to produce knowledge and manage information in their dioceses. By examining manuscripts and early print in archives across northern and central Italy as well as in the U.K. and the visual and material remains of early modern bishops’ palaces, the book shows how bishops reinvented themselves and their administration in a period when their role was deeply contested.
McMahon’s articles have appeared in International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past & Present. She earned her BA and PhD in history at Princeton University, and her MPhil in early modern history at the University of Cambridge.
McMahon is excited to offer courses at UT Austin on book history, the history of ideas, religious history, and the relationship between “scholarly” and “popular” culture in the early modern period, amongst other topics. She is happy to advise undergraduate honors theses on any aspect of the premodern world.
