• Region: Europe
• Time: 16th Century; 17th Century
• Theme: Art History; Cultural History; History of Science; History of the Book; Intellectual History

Ashley Gonik began her PhD in the History Department in 2017. She is a book historian who studies the material aspects of intellectual practices in early modern Europe. Currently, she is working on a dissertation about printed tables across myriad humanistic and scientific genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The dissertation will address the production and reception of this ubiquitous and ostensibly timeless diagrammatic form to destabilize assumptions about the table as a tool of information management and visual communication. Her interest in text–image relationships developed during her MA in the History of Art at the University of York (2016), where she wrote her dissertation on three sixteenth-century historical tables. She was a Pforzheimer Fellow with the Harvard Map Collection in 2018, and she received a travel grant to conduct research at the Museum Plantin-Moretus and Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp in 2019. She has been proud to serve as a student organizer for the Early Modern Workshop and the Harvard-Yale Conference in Book History. She also holds a BA in History with a minor in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2015).