Mark Jurdjevic, a professor and Chair of the Department of History at York University’s Glendon Campus, has been named to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. He is one of 48 members appointed as part of the 2015 cohort. The College is Canada’s first national system of multidisciplinary recognition for the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leadership.
“This appointment to the RSC New College is a testament to the breadth and quality of Professor Jurdjevic’s scholarship. We are proud of his achievements and his ongoing contributions to enriching Glendon’s liberal arts mandate,” said Christina Clark-Kazak, Associate Principal, Research and Graduate Studies.
Jurdjevic, a social historian of ideas, studies the political and intellectual history of early modern Europe. His books and articles have shown how abstract ideas became powerful agents of social and political change in the Italian Renaissance. He focuses in particular on the city-state of Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was widely recognized as one of Europe’s most intellectually innovative centers of learning and one of Italy’s few remaining self-governing communes.
Jurdjevic’s first book, Guardians of Republicanism: The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance, grew out of two years of archival research in Florence funded by SSHRC and the Fulbright Program and was completed during his postdoctoral appointment as a Mellon fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. His second book, A Great and Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought, began when Jurdjevic held a Melvin J. Kahn fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence and assumed its final form in 2012-2013 when he held a Felix Gilbert/National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The book raised thought-provoking questions about the relationship between knowledge and power in the life and writings of Niccolò Machiavelli.
Jurdjevic is currently writing Desperation’s Remedies: Machiavelli’s Correspondence and the Transformation of the Humanities, a study of the power of the humanities to impose order on a chaotic and collapsing world. It does so through an analysis of Machiavelli’s correspondence with political philosophers, historians, poets, and playwrights.
Jurdjevic will be inducted to the RSC during a ceremony on November 27, in Victoria, BC.
For more information, visit the Royal Society of Canada website.
Professor Jurdjevic discusses his research on video for Innovation@Glendon.