 Daniel Stolzenberg
Assistant Professor
E: dstolz@ucdavis.edu
T: 530-752-2232
O: 3235 SSH
| Academic Biography | | Daniel Stolzenberg studied at Columbia, Berkeley (BA), Indiana University (MA in the History & Philosophy of Science), and Stanford (PhD). Prior to coming to UC Davis he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. He is writing a book called Egyptian Oedipus: The Hieroglyphs of Athanasius Kircher. It examines a 17th-century Jesuit's quixotic attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions that they encoded. The book situates Kircher in the context of oriental philology, which emerged as a discipline in this period, and seventeenth-century investigations of idolatry, as well as earlier traditions of Neoplatonist symbolism and magic. His other research projects include a micro-history about a Dutch Protestant bookseller's sales trip to Rome in 1660, made interesting by a Copernican Atlas and Holy Office of the Inquisition; a study of European ideas about the role of magic in human history between 1550 and 1800; and a translation of a pornographic Jesuit confession manual from 17th-century Prague. |
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| Research Interests | | Early modern Europe, especially the seventeenth century; history of science; intellectual and cultural history; history of the book; Italy, especially Rome. |
| Selected Publications | “Utility, Edification, and Superstition: Jesuit Censorship and Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John O’Malley, et. al. University of Toronto Press, 2006. A German translation is also forthcoming in another edited volume. “Four Trees, Some Amulets, and the Seventy-Two Names of God: Kircher Reveals the Kabbalah.” In Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (Routledge, 2004), 149–69 Edited book: The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001). |
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