Dr Nat Cutter
Nominated Fellow, October - December, 2026
Home institution: University of Melbourne
I am a Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I am currently working on several projects around cultural and economic relations between Britain, North Africa, and the Mediterranean world; my broader interests include the social history of trade, media history, diplomatic and international history, digital humanities, and piracy. My publications include Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662-1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026), Cultural Data: The Intimate Analytics of Digital Collections (with Tyne Daile Sumner and Rachel Fensham, Routledge, 2026), and articles in Gender & History, Renaissance Studies, Cultural and Social History, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. In 2026, I received the Ann M. Scott Parergon Prize for my work on the transcultural history of ‘morocco’ leather in early modern Britain.
Project title: Reading the Maghreb in Early Modern Britain: Marginalia, Provenance, and Networked Imaginaries
For much of the early modern period, Britons imagined the North African states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco through fears of corsairing, captivity, and conversion, even as merchants, diplomats, and sailors built increasingly pragmatic relationships with the region. My monograph project, Reading the Maghreb in Early Modern Britain, asks how ordinary readers came to understand this closest and often most confronting corner of the Islamicate world. Building on my earlier research into how periodical news reshaped British knowledge of the Maghreb, the book turns to the most concrete surviving evidence of reading itself — marginalia, ownership inscriptions, and provenance marks in English-language books — combining close analysis with network mapping of who owned and read these works. Having surveyed more than 600 volumes across over forty-five libraries in four countries, I am now extending the study to Scotland and northern England, which preserve more early modern English-language books about the Maghreb than anywhere in Britain outside London, Oxford, and Cambridge. From October to December 2026 I will survey Edinburgh's major collections, with visits to Glasgow, St Andrews, Perth, and Aberdeen, testing whether readers there reproduced metropolitan ideas of the Maghreb, adapted them to local concerns, or resisted them.