Serena Strecker
Late medieval and early modern Europe, religious history, digital humanities, media history, women’s and gender history
Serena Strecker is a historian and digital humanist of early modern Europe and a Ph.D. candidate in History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Life is Taught Better by Examples: Lutheran and Catholic Exempla of Life, Death, and Beyond in Early Modern Europe” examines the exemplary stories meant to shape the mental worlds of ordinary people in the aftermath of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Her research uses automated transcription and concordance software to analyze more than 27,000 pages of early modern exempla collections. Her published work in the Sixteenth Century Journal and Religions considers the potential for these digital methods both to expand the breadth of historical research and empower more ethical labor practices in the transcription of early modern printed books.