Lillian Datchev

Lillian Datchev will be Assistant Professor of Humanities starting in Fall 2026. Before coming to UF, she will hold a two-year Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and has held the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of premodern Europe. Her research spans the histories of knowledge, material culture, and early capitalism in medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. Datchev’s work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly.

Current Project

Datchev’s current book project, The Origins of Archaeology, investigates how and why humanists began to study ancient artifacts systematically from the fifteenth century on. It shows how this scholarly movement originated in cultural traditions that first developed in mercantile communities in the Italian colonies and commercial outposts in the Adriatic, Aegean, and Crimean regions.

Education

• Ph.D. in History, Princeton University, 2024
• M.A. in Cultural and Intellectual History, 1300–1650, The Warburg Institute, 2016
• B.A. in Philosophy and History of Mathematics and Science, St. John’s College, Annapolis, 2013

Publications - Articles

‘Ciriaco d’Ancona and the Origins of Epigraphy’, Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023), 1-53.