Individual Listing

5503 HUMANITIES SOCSCI
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Head, Randolph C

Professor of History

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

History


Biography

Randy Head's path to Riverside includes a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and an A.B. in anthropology from Harvard, and also six years of professional theater experience as a technician and manager. He has published extensively on religion, language and politics in early modern Switzerland, and is currently conducting research for a comparative study of archives and their inventories in Europe from 1450 to 1750. Professor Head's teaching interests include the history of republics in Europe, the history of persecution and toleration in the West since the year 1000, and early modern world history.

Degrees

PhD History 1992

University of Virginia

MA History 1988

University of Virginia

AB Anthropology 1979

Harvard College

Awards

2007-08 Fellow, American Philosophical Society
2000 Resident, Fellow, Center for Ideas and Society, UC Riverside
2002 Fellow, School for Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
1998 Visiting Scholar, Swiss Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Switzerland
1995-96 Professor of the Year, UCR University Honors Program
1995 Resident, Fellow, Center for Ideas and Society, UC Riverside
1989 Fulbright Scholarships


Research Area

early modern Europe with special attention to the history of archives and the history of Switzerland, and the early modern world.

Publications

His first book on Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons (Cambridge University Press, 1995), investigates political ideas among Alpine peasants during the sixteenth century. More recently, he has edited a collection of essays, Orthodoxies and Heterdoxies in Early Modern German Culture (Brill, 2007) and published a biography of Georg Jenatsch, an early seventeenth-century pastor, soldier, and murderer who was assassinated in 1639 by someone dressed as a bear (University of Rochester Press, 2008). He has published articles on William Tell, on religious coexistence and on language use in early modern Switzerland, and on the Inquisition and the Jews in early modern Venice.