Participant Info
- First Name
- Rachel
- Last Name
- Midura
- Country
- United States
- State
- VA
- rmidura@vt.edu
- Affiliation
- Virginia Tech
- Website URL
- rachelmidura.com
- Keywords
- early modern, digital history, digital humanities, italy, habsburg, espionage, surveillance, intelligence, communications, information, postal history
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Rachel Midura is an Associate Professor of Digital and Early Modern European History at Virginia Tech. Her first book is Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, March 2025), on the advent of postal networks and their role in diplomacy, espionage, and surveillance. In her research, Midura approaches the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and the European postal network. She revisits traditional social, cultural and material historical approaches to incorporate twenty-first century understanding of media and social networks. She reads across the vast digitization projects of recent years to synthesize new historical models for communication.
- Recent Publications
Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (CUP, 2025)
“Inside the Black Chamber,” History Today (2025)
“‘They Hide from Me, Like the Devil from the Cross’: Transalpine Postal Routes as Intelligence Work, 1555–1645,” History (2023)
“Itinerating Europe: Early modern spatial networks in printed itineraries, 1545–1700,” Journal of Social History (2021)
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Link Text
- Country Focus
- Italy & Central Europe
- Expertise by Geography
- Western Europe
- Expertise by Chronology
- Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern
- Expertise by Topic
- Book History, Computational, Diplomacy, Libraries & Archives, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Religion, Technology
