Faculty Research Fellow
Shami Ghosh (Ph.D. Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2009) is Associate Professor of Medieval History. His work encompasses the intellectual, cultural, social, and economic history of medieval Latin Europe, literature in the Germanic vernaculars of the Middle Ages, and comparative/global economic history to c.1800. Educated at King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Toronto, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Leicester, Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies before returning to U of T as faculty in 2016. We are pleased to welcome Shami back as a Fellow of the Jackman Humanities Institute; he held a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellowship in 2009.
Fellowship Research Project—The Art of Dying Well and the Origins of Capitalist Modernity
This project examines late medieval and early modern concepts concerning, and practices of preparing for, a ‘good death’; and the relationship between changes to these and the transformations of economic ideology and behaviour that led to the triumph of capitalism. It seeks to investigate whether religious attitudes towards the afterlife and death had any influence on people’s economic behaviours in a global perspective, and whether these anchored concepts of a pre-capitalist moral economy that was destroyed partly because of changes in religious culture in the early modern centuries.