Jennifer Strtak

Jennifer Strtak is a Princeton-Mellon / Humanities Council Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate in Architecture at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the built environment and technology of the early modern world, particularly the socio-spatial impact of carriages in 17th- and 18th-century Paris. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University (2024), an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (2016), and a BA from Trinity College, University of Toronto (2015).

Her work challenges conventional views of carriages as symbols of elite luxury, instead analyzing their role in urban transformation, social inequality, and imperial expansion. Methodologically, she uses municipal ordinances, legal records, financial accounts, and visual sources to trace how infrastructure and mobility shaped power dynamics in early modern cities. In Spring 2025, she will teach City and Nature: Urban Nature and Society, 1450-1800.

Strtak’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fox International Fellowship Program. She previously served as a Research Fellow at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (2021–2022).

Her forthcoming monograph, Routes of Power: Mobility, Social Inequality, and Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris, examines how carriages catalyzed urban change, including the covert use of vehicles for colonial deportation and the gendered dynamics of movement. This work intersects with themes of bureaucratic control, infrastructure development, and human/animal relationships.