Yotam Tsal is a historian of modern Europe and of science. His research explores the intersection of empire, the natural environment, and material culture. His first book project, The Bird Craze in Eighteenth-Century France, reimagines eighteenth-century ornithology “from below” as a collective, imperial enterprise embedded in consumer culture, global trade, and the emerging public sphere. The book uncovers a broad cultural preoccupation with birds that encompassed the production, circulation, and consumption of avian-related goods, including porcelain, live and preserved specimens from around the world, books, poems, illustrations, furniture, and paintings. His second book project, Animals on the Move, will examine animal mobility in the early modern French colonial world.
Dr. Tsal received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in French Historical Studies and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has received funding from the American Historical Association, the French government, and the Mellon Foundation, among other sources.
Dr. Tsal’s interest in material culture, empire, and science also shapes his teaching. He works with students to develop their historical imagination through encounters with written texts and paintings, dried flower specimens and porcelain cups, chocolate and caricatures, as well as field trips to places like the zoo. In his free time, he enjoys hiking around Tallahassee’s lakes.