Samuel Roberts

I am originally from Louisville, Kentucky and received my B.A. in History from Hillsdale College in 2019. I entered the Notre Dame program in the fall of 2020 and am interested in the history of intellectual culture in early modern Europe. More specifically, I intend to study the ways in which Florentine Platonism influenced several developments in mid-sixteenth-century scholarship, ranging from early histories of philosophy to studies in natural magic and alchemy. As my research develops, I would also like to examine how European intellectuals and missionaries of this period used narratives of "ancient theology" and "barbarian wisdom" to orient their understanding of indigenous cultures in the Americas and East Asia.