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About Alexandra Ortolja-Baird

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth and Visiting Researcher at The British Museum. Her research intersects Intellectual History, History of the Book and Digital Humanities.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth.

She tweets at @timetravelallie

alexandra.ortolja-baird@port.ac.uk

Alexandra's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Alexandra:

Early Modern History January 7, 2023

Fictions of Consent

Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

Urvashi Chakravarty

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
In Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022),  Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern …
Intellectual History March 14, 2022

Permanent Crisis

The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and …
Intellectual History March 7, 2022

The Diplomatic Enlightenment

Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation

Edward Jones Corredera

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the …
Intellectual History December 8, 2021

Crafting Enlightenment

Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks

Jennifer Ferng and Lauren R. Cannady

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different …
Intellectual History December 2, 2021

The Color of Equality

Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought

Devin J. Vartija

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color …
Intellectual History October 11, 2021

The State of Nature

Histories of an Idea

Mark Somos and Anne Peters

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The phrase, “state of nature”, has been used over centuries to describe the uncultivated state of lands and animals, nudity, innocence, heaven and hell, interstate relations, and the locus of …
General History September 24, 2021

Big and Little Histories

Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography

Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Anne Martin

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography (Routledge, 2021) introduces students to ethics in historiography through an exploration of how historians in different times and places have explained …
Digital Humanities September 21, 2021

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum

Mike Jones

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (Routledge, 2021) provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of …
Intellectual History September 17, 2021

Aesthetic Science

Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

Alexander Wragge-Morley

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in …
Intellectual History May 25, 2021

Charlie Brown's America

The Popular Politics of Peanuts

Blake Scott Ball

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Despite—or because of—its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie …
Intellectual History January 19, 2021

Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge

British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832

Louisiane Ferlier and Benedicte Miyamoto

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the …
Intellectual History November 24, 2020

Digitizing Enlightenment

Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured …
Intellectual History November 6, 2020

Capitalisms

Towards a Global History

Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, aims to decenter work on the history of capitalism by looking at the …
Intellectual History October 29, 2020

Mapping Crisis

Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping

Doug Specht

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the …
Intellectual History October 2, 2020

The Past Can't Heal Us

The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights

Lea David

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
In The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and …
Intellectual History September 18, 2020

Rights at the Margins

Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives

Jonathan Robinson

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial …
Intellectual History September 8, 2020

The Morals of the Market

Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Jessica Whyte

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte …
Intellectual History September 7, 2020

The Early Modern Global South in Print

Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge

Sandra Young

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices …
Intellectual History August 28, 2020

On the Spirit of Rights

Dan Edelstein

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic …
Intellectual History August 25, 2020

Contesting Europe

Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800

N. Detering and I. Walser-Bürgler,

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
While the term ‘Europe’ was used sporadically in ancient and medieval times, it proliferated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gained a prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries …
Intellectual History August 20, 2020

Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Valerie Wayne

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English …
Intellectual History August 3, 2020

John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment

Family Life and World History

Nicholas B. Miller

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher …
Intellectual History July 21, 2020

Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850

Giulia Bonazza

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in …
Intellectual History July 13, 2020

Future Histories

What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology

Lizzie O’Shea

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and …