Educated at Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 1990. He has held fellowships at Cambridge, the University of Chicago, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He has published books on the relationship between empire and religious toleration in the eighteenth century (Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain), the culture out of which emerged Venetian opera (The Song of the Soul: Understanding ‘Poppea’), and seventeenth-century ideals of individual excellence (Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century). He is currently at work on a study of the beginning of oriental studies in Europe (Peiresc’s Orient: The Promise of Cultural History).