James Shaw

Dr. James Shaw serves as Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History and Director of Education at the University of Sheffield's School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities. With appointments since 2005 and prior positions at Oxford and Sussex, he maintains active roles in teaching, research administration (currently Director of Postgraduate Studies), and scholarly leadership as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

His educational background includes an M.A. from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence (1998). His academic journey began with a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford examining Venetian petty crime, leading to his award-winning monograph The Justice of Venice.

Shaw's research centers on the interplay between legal frameworks and economic practices in early modern Italy, particularly Venice and Florence. His work explores credit disputes, market ethics, and the embedding of commerce within personal relationships, utilizing sources like supplications for justice and fraud denunciations to reveal how ethical concepts operated in daily market life. Current projects investigate contractual morality in Venetian fraud cases and seek to develop collaborative research on early modern market ethics.

His publication record demonstrates consistent output in top historical journals, with recent work analyzing gender and law in pre-unification Italy, Venetian credit economies, and the moral dimensions of early modern contracts. Shaw's scholarship bridges legal, economic, and social history through meticulous archival analysis.

• British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship
• British Academy Competition for Postdoctoral Monographs
• The Gladstone Prize (Royal Historical Society)
• Senate Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (2009)

Shaw actively supervises doctoral research in early modern Italian history, currently advising Tobias Gardner on Sheffield's slavery connections and previously guiding four PhD completions including Joe Tryner's study of firearm violence in Bologna. His Wellcome Trust-funded project Selling Health in Renaissance Italy (with Evelyn Welch) examined apothecary practices as intermediaries between medical theory and practice. He encourages collaboration through his initiative to establish a research group focused on early modern market ethics.

Shaw maintains significant administrative responsibilities including Director of Education roles and previous service as Exams Officer and Senior Tutor, while his research continues to reshape understanding of legal-economic interactions in Renaissance Italy through innovative use of judicial records.