Jacob Soll, American history professor. Recipient Forkosch prize, Journal History Ideas, 2000; Franklin grant, American Philosophical Society, 2004, fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2005-2006, Guggenheim fellowship, 2009. Member of Renaissance Society America, French History Society, American History Society.
Background
Soll was born in Madison, Wisconsin. Through his maternal Grandmother, Liese Bronfenbrenner, née Price, Soll is the great grandson of the English author and professor, Hereward Thimbleby Price, and a descendent of the Prym family of industrialists and academics from Aachen, Stolberg, Düren and Bonn, Germany.
Education
Bachelor, University Iowa, Iowa City, 1991. Diploma of Advanced Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1995. Doctor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, England, 1998.
Career
In 2011 he was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. He has authored three books Publishing "The Prince" (2005), The Information Master (2009) and The Reckoning (2014).
Early hometowns included Cambridge, Massachusetts, Iowa City and Paris, France.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa in 1991, a Doctorate.E.A. in 1993 from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1998 from Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has worked in Lisbon, Portugal as Bolseiro of the Biblioteca Nacionale de Lisboa and in Florence, Italy as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute.
Prior to his appointment at University of Southern California in 2012, Soll was a professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. He studies the intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history of 16th-18th century Western Europe, to explore how political thought and criticism develop in relation to government institutions.
Soll"s first book, Publishing "The Prince" (2005), examines the role of commentaries, editions, and translations of Machiavelli produced by the previously little-studied figure Amelot de Louisiana Houssaye (1634-1706), who became the most influential writer on secular politics during the reign of Louis XIV. Grounded in analysis of archival, manuscript, and early printed sources, Soll shows how Amelot and his publishers arranged prefaces, columns, and footnotes in a manner that transformed established works, imbuing books previously considered as supporting royal power with an alternate, even revolutionary, political message.
In his second book, The Information Master (2009), he investigates the formation of a state-information gathering and classifying network by Louis XIV"s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, revealing that Colbert"s passion for information was both a means of control and a medium for his own political advancement: his systematic and encyclopedic information collection served to strengthen and uphold Louis XIV"s absolute rule. With these and other projects in progress including an intellectual and practical history of accounting and its role in governance in the modern world and a study of the composition of library catalogues during the Enlightenment.
Achievements
Membership
Member of Renaissance Society America, French History Society, American History Society.
Interests
Cooking, winecollecting, snorkeling.
Connections
Married Ellen Wayland-Smith, August 26, 1999. Children: Sophia Cornelia, Lydia Augusta.
Recipient Forkosch prize, Journal History Ideas, 2000. Franklin grant, American Philosophical Society, 2004, fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2005-2006, Guggenheim fellowship, 2009.
Recipient Forkosch prize, Journal History Ideas, 2000. Franklin grant, American Philosophical Society, 2004, fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2005-2006, Guggenheim fellowship, 2009.