Dr. John Martin

This past year Dr. John Jeffries Martin, a historian, joined the faculty at Duke after twenty-five years of teaching at Trinity University. John received both his bachelor's degree and his doctorate from Harvard.

Dr. Martin's primary area of research lies in the history of identities - religious, social, and personal - and how social and cultural factors contribute to "the way we are in the world." He has explored this topic in his Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City, which focuses on religious choices individuals made in this famous port city during the sixteenth century, and, most recently, in his Myths of Renaissance Individualism, a reconsideration of the kinds of self that emerged in Early Modern Europe. He is currently writing a book on the history of sincerity. Part history of the human heart, part history of how we express ourselves to others, this current project aims, above all, to illustrate how some of our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we interact with others are conditioned by larger historical forces - from, for instance, the printing press and emerging nationalisms to Cyperspace and globalization.

Dr. Martin is the editor of four anthologies, most recently The Renaissance World, a work that brings together over thirty leading experts from Britain and the United States to offer new perspectives on Renaissance art, humanism, politics, culture, and exploration. He has been a recipient of fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In May of 2010 he will serve as professeur invité at the Sorbonne in Paris.

In addition to his historical work, Dr. Martin, who has served most recently as chair of the Department of History at Trinity; has published on higher education in Academe, College Teaching, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He believes strongly that, in the classroom, it is critical that our students be engaged on a personal and intense level by challenging teachers. Otherwise, he fears, the young people for whom our institutions of higher learning have so much responsibility are "merely passing through," and our universities and colleges are not living up to their larger obligations to society.