Rate My Professor Megan Williams

Dr. Megan Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen. She holds a BA in International Relations and Central & Eastern European Studies from Grinnell College (2000), an MA in Central & East European History from Columbia University (2002), and a PhD in Early Modern European History from Columbia University (2009), with a dissertation entitled "Dangerous Diplomacy and Dependable Kin: Transformations in Central European Statecraft, 1526-1540." Prior to her current position, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in New York and was nominated as an American Council of Learned Societies-Mellon Early Career Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Williams specializes in diplomatic history, history of political communication, paper history, Habsburg history, sixteenth-century history, Central and Eastern European history, Mediterranean history, and transnational history. Her multi-disciplinary research explores paper's role in the shift from oral to written diplomatic practices in early modern Europe (ca. 1460-1560), archival afterlives of diplomatic paper, and paper as a political communications medium. She directed the NWO-VENI funded "Paper Princes" project (2012-2017), which resulted in the international conference "The Politics of Paper in the Early Modern World" (2016, 41 speakers from 12+ countries) and the exhibition "Paper Unfolding: Groningers and their Paper" (2017, over 6,000 visitors). She is editing the conference proceedings and authoring a monograph on paper in early modern diplomacy. Additional research connects diplomacy with medical humanities, focusing on gout and illnesses in diplomatic practice. Key publications include "Paper in the Piazza: the Late Medieval and Early Modern Trade in Venetian Paper" (Brepols, 2021), "Unter dem Zeichen des Adlers: Frankfurt as Hub of the Sixteenth-Century Central European Paper Trade" (Brill, 2021), "Ad regem: Diplomatic Documents as Artifacts of Early Modern Foreign Policymaking" (Verloren, 2020), "Immobile Ambassadors: Gout and Early Modern Diplomacy" (Sixteenth Century Journal, 2016), and forthcoming "Paper Presents: Diplomatic Safe Conducts Across Sixteenth-Century Habsburg-Ottoman Borders" (Brill). Williams supervises PhD candidates on paper in the Dutch East India Company and English intelligencers in Central Europe, coordinates the History Department's International Track, and serves on examination boards. Her fellowships include Whiting Foundation (2007-08), Mellon Interdisciplinary (2007-08), Fulbright-Hays (2006-07), Ernst Mach (2006), and German Marshall (2005).