John Gagné is an Associate Investigator (2014) at The University of Sydney. He teaches early modern history, with a focus on Italy and France, and he also studies comparative colonialisms, gender, information history, and material culture. He has taught senior undergraduate classes on “Food, Environment, and Culture” and on “Information History.” He is writing a book on war and the breaking of Renaissance states, and is preparing another book on paper and the history of obliteration in the West. An overarching theme in his research is histories of brokenness: to study the consequences when ideas, institutions, and materials cease to function meaningfully to their users.
Contact
john.gagne@sydney.edu.au
Research
Rethinking Fear and Despair in the Italian Wars (1494–1527)
Relevant Publications
‘Emotional Attachments: Iron Hands, their Makers and their Wearers, 1450–1600’. In Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History, edited by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, pp. 133–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.