NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Josephine Quinn

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Josephine Quinn is currently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University. She has degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley; she has taught in America, Italy, and the UK; and she co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. In January 2025 she will take up the Chair in Ancient History at Cambridge University.

Tell us about your research project.

I spent my time at NYPL in September working on some follow-up lectures to my recent book How the World Made the West (2024). The book debunks the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle with local roots, an idea that erases a much bigger story of the emergence of modern European culture through contact and exchange, journeys, and relationships. This entangled world, I argued, was lost to the 19th-century notion of ‘civilizations’, the idea of distinct cultures associated with particular places that emerge, flourish, and then decline largely alone. The new lectures shift the focus from objects, technologies, and ideas moving towards what we now call the West to the way the West looks back at the societies that produced them, tracing the gradual emergence of what I call ‘civilizational thinking’ through a series of maps of the world produced in Babylon, western Anatolia, Rome, Palermo, and the Balearics. 

When did you first get the idea for your research project? 

When I was a Cullman Fellow at NYPL in 2019–2020 I spent a lot of time in the Map Room. It was the excellent staff there who persuaded me to include so many maps in my own book—one for each of 30 chapters—and they awakened an interest in the cartography of world history to which I always wanted to return once the manuscript was finished. So it was a real joy to come back for the first time since we all had to leave in March 2020 to finish off a final piece of that project.

What's your favorite spot in the Library?

It’s a toss-up between the Map Division and the Cullman Center, but I have also spent a lot of time in the Dorot Jewish Division: I remember a very happy few days in 2019 discovering the pleasures of reading Ugaritic myth there.

Describe your research routine.

I write and edit in the mornings, from about 9–1 (or 2, if I take too many breaks), and then in the afternoon I read, check references, and increasingly check email until I decide it’s dinner time. I’m a re-drafter: everything I publish has gone through between 10 and 100 edits.

What research tools could you not live without?

Scrivener: this is the software that I use to write everything from books to reviews, and even lectures. It lets me map the work out, move sections around, and compare old and new versions: I love it. The only thing I don’t use it for is academic articles, because they are almost always versions of lectures I’ve already given, so they are already in reasonable structural shape before I start messing around with them again.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

Looking through NYPL's digital map collections one day I came across the 1821 Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World. It’s a remarkable map that literally color-codes the whole of the world by degrees of civilization. The most advanced societies are ‘enlightened,’ and depicted in white with rays of light: that’s France, England, or Austria, for instance. Places like Italy and Greece are speckled white because they are just ‘civilized’. North Africa is half-civilized, like India, Turkey, and the British colonies in eastern Australia and the Cape, and those countries are filled in with little bricks outlined in black. The captions make the connections between Christianity and Europe and civilization clear: “Europe contains 2 millions of square miles with 214 millions of inhabitants generally enlightened and professing Christianity.” ‘Barbarous’ countries are scored though with black lines, while ‘savage’ ones like Patagonia or most of North America are covered by a tight grid pattern, making them almost entirely black. I was then able to look at the map itself in the Map Room, and the atlas from which it came in the Rare Book Division: a US School Atlas published in Connecticut in the 1820s. On the inside front cover, I found the following ‘advertisement’: “The chart of the inhabited world is believed to be unlike any which has been executed before, in exhibiting the moral state of every county by various degrees of light and shade, and the appropriate emblems of religion and governments, and forming these abstract subjects into a picture addressed to the eye.”

How do you maintain your research momentum?

If I get stuck, I try to go and have a look at whatever it is I’m having trouble with. Not so easy if it’s fur routes in the Caucasus.

After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?

I’m not sure academics are really great unwinders.

What's your favorite distraction?

Right now, Bluesky, though I am reading more than writing as I get its measure.

Who makes the best coffee in the neighborhood?

When I was at the Cullman Center I loved Milk & Honey in Ditmas Park, but I never ferreted out good coffee spots near the Library!