Dr. Marissa Smit-Bose joined Christs College as a Bye Fellow in 2024 and is Assistant Professor of Early Modern World History. Prior to Cambridge, she received her PhD from Harvard University and also holds an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research combines the methods of animal and new diplomatic history and devotes special attention to Ottoman-Italian entanglement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
She is currently preparing her first book, provisionally titled Riding in Translation: Ottoman Horses and Renaissance Equestrianism, organized around the question: ‘What happens to a complex interspecies relationship like horse-riding when its partners cross cultural boundaries?’ It will demonstrate how Italian equestrians categorized, acquired, cared for, and rode horses from the Ottoman Empire and explore Italy’s role as a nexus through which Ottoman equestrian culture saturated early modern Europe.
At Cambridge, her teaching ranges widely across early the global modern, and embraces themes including material culture, the environment, and religion in Eurasia’s Islamicate societies.
