Associate Professor
Paul Dover joined the KSU faculty in 2005, and is a historian of Europe and the Mediterranean world in the late medieval and early modern periods. An enthusiastic teacher who relishes exploring period texts and big questions with his students, he routinely teaches surveys of world and European history, Origins of Great Traditions, senior research seminars, and specialized courses in topics like Machiavelli and the history of information. He also regularly teaches a course on historiography - his textbook The Changing Face of the Past: an Introduction to Western Historiography (Cognella, 2014) stems from his experience teaching this course. Dr. Dover’s research interests focus on the political, diplomatic and cultural history of Europe in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. He has published articles in journals as varied as Mediterranean Studies, The Journal of Early Modern History, Renaissance and Reformation, The Journal of Urban History, Archival Studies, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History, and The International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
One thrust of his research focuses on diplomacy and international politics in the Renaissance - his most recent publication in this area is “Ambassadors as travelers in fifteenth-century Italy”, in Gabor Galleri and Rachel Willie, eds., Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World(Routledge, 2019). He is the editor of, and a contributor to, Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), a study of the role of secretaries, chancellors and favorites in early modern Eurasian diplomacy. He also contributed a chapter on diplomacy to the recent Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History (2015; ed. Hamish Scott).
Professor Dover has also written on the related "early modern information revolution," tracing the changing attitudes and practices of Europeans toward information acquisition, storage and management. On this topic he is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Information Revolution of Early Modern Europe, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and expected in 2019. Also appearing in 2019 will be an essay on the role of information in diplomacy and espionage for The Princeton Companion to the History of Information, edited by Ann Blair, Tony Grafton and Anne Marie Goeing, from Princeton University Press.
A third area of publication has been the reception and publication history in the Renaissance of works of classical geography, in particular the Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus – most recent of his several articles on the topic was “How Heinrich Bullinger read his Solinus. Reading ancient geography in 16th-century Switzerland” in K. Brodersen, ed. Solinus: New Studies (Verlag Antike, 2014). He has also recently written an article on the the copy of Aldus Manutius' edition (1502) of Dante's Divine Comedy, which is housed at KSU's own Bentley Rare Book Library - this will appear in 2019 in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History.
In 2015, Dr. Dover won two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The first was a long-term residential research fellowship for 2015-6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, where Dr. Dover researched The Information Revolution. The second funded the development of an original, interdisciplinary course on the question “what is the relationship between the past and present?”, as part of the NEH’s Enduring Questions program. This course was delivered as part of the KSU Honors curriculum. He is currently working on a volume that will examine how the praxis and methodology of different disciplines are shaped by their approach to this question.
Prior to coming to KSU, Dr. Dover taught at the University of the South in Tennessee and at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. He lives in downtown Atlanta.
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About Paul Dover
Paul Dover joined the KSU faculty in 2005, and is a historian of Europe and the Mediterranean world in the late medieval and early modern periods. An enthusiastic teacher who relishes exploring period texts and big questions with his students, he routinely teaches surveys of world and European history, Origins of Great Traditions, senior research seminars, and specialized courses in topics like Machiavelli and the history of information. He also regularly teaches a course on historiography - his textbook The Changing Face of the Past: an Introduction to Western Historiography (Cognella, 2014) stems from his experience teaching this course. Dr. Dover’s research interests focus on the political, diplomatic and cultural history of Europe in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. He has published articles in journals as varied as Mediterranean Studies, The Journal of Early Modern History, Renaissance and Reformation, The Journal of Urban History, Archival Studies, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History, and The International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
One thrust of his research focuses on diplomacy and international politics in the Renaissance - his most recent publication in this area is “Ambassadors as travelers in fifteenth-century Italy”, in Gabor Galleri and Rachel Willie, eds., Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World(Routledge, 2019). He is the editor of, and a contributor to, Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), a study of the role of secretaries, chancellors and favorites in early modern Eurasian diplomacy. He also contributed a chapter on diplomacy to the recent Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History (2015; ed. Hamish Scott).
Professor Dover has also written on the related "early modern information revolution," tracing the changing attitudes and practices of Europeans toward information acquisition, storage and management. On this topic he is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Information Revolution of Early Modern Europe, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and expected in 2019. Also appearing in 2019 will be an essay on the role of information in diplomacy and espionage for The Princeton Companion to the History of Information, edited by Ann Blair, Tony Grafton and Anne Marie Goeing, from Princeton University Press.
A third area of publication has been the reception and publication history in the Renaissance of works of classical geography, in particular the Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus – most recent of his several articles on the topic was “How Heinrich Bullinger read his Solinus. Reading ancient geography in 16th-century Switzerland” in K. Brodersen, ed. Solinus: New Studies (Verlag Antike, 2014). He has also recently written an article on the the copy of Aldus Manutius' edition (1502) of Dante's Divine Comedy, which is housed at KSU's own Bentley Rare Book Library - this will appear in 2019 in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History.
In 2015, Dr. Dover won two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The first was a long-term residential research fellowship for 2015-6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, where Dr. Dover researched The Information Revolution. The second funded the development of an original, interdisciplinary course on the question “what is the relationship between the past and present?”, as part of the NEH’s Enduring Questions program. This course was delivered as part of the KSU Honors curriculum. He is currently working on a volume that will examine how the praxis and methodology of different disciplines are shaped by their approach to this question.
Prior to coming to KSU, Dr. Dover taught at the University of the South in Tennessee and at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. He lives in downtown Atlanta.
| Present | Associate Professor, Kennesaw State University ‐ Department of History and Philosophy | |
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