Story and History: Western Civilization Since 1550, 1st edition

About our authors

Dr. Robert C. Davis finished his undergraduate studies at a private California university in 1970, then spent much of the 1970s and 1980s working as a furniture maker, moving periodically to Europe. He then returned to university studies and earned his PhD in history at Johns Hopkins University in 1989. Having learned the nature, feel, and smell of wood and woodworking, he was attracted to the story of shipwrights and boat building while living in Venice, Italy, and chose this as the topic of his dissertation. He published his first book, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal, in 1991, and followed this with several more studies focused on Venetian society and popular culture during the 16th and 17th centuries, including The War of the Fists (1994) and The Jews of Early Modern Venice (2001).

While teaching at Ohio State University from 1992 until retiring in 2015, he broadened his interests to encompass Italian and Mediterranean history more generally. While doing so, he co-edited Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (1998) and co-authored Renaissance People (2011). He also traveled and researched widely around the Italian peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. His research and writing were made possible by year-long fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Ohio State University, the American Academy in Rome, the Fulbright Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Since retiring, Davis has lived in Santa Cruz, California, where he has begun writing novels about bandits in sixteenth-century Italy. He spends his spare time walking through the redwoods, listening to the sounds of the Pacific and looking for otters.