Eric Ash

Faculty Profile

Professor
ao0103@wayne.edu

Department

History

Phone

313-577-2525

Fax

313-577-6987

Office

3094 Faculty/Administration Building

Biography

Eric Ash was born and raised in upstate New York; he has taught at Wayne State since the fall of 2002. His teaching and research interests broadly include the history of Britain and Ireland, early modern Europe (16th and 17th centuries), the history of science & technology, and environmental history. He is interested in working with qualified graduate students in any of these fields. 

Education

  • A.B., Harvard University, 1994
  • M.A, Princeton University, 1996
  • Ph.D., Princeton University, 2000

Selected publications

Books

  • The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)
  • Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)

Articles and chapters

  • “By Any Other Name: Early Modern Expertise and the Problem of Anachronism,” History and Technology (2019), DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1608082
  • “Reclaiming a New World: Fen Drainage, Improvement, and Projectors in Seventeenth-Century England,” Early Science and Medicine 21 (2016): 445-69
  • “Expertise and the Early Modern State,” Osiris 25 (2010): 1-24
  • “Amending Nature: Draining the English Fens,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Edita and University of Chicago Press, 2007), 117-143
  • “Navigation Techniques and Practice in the Renaissance,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3,Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. by David Woodward (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 509-527
  • “Trading Expertise: Sebastian Cabot between Spain and England” (co-authored with Alison Sandman), Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 813-846
  • “‘A note and a Caveat for the Merchant’: Mercantile Advisors in Elizabethan England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 1-31
  • “Queen v. Northumberland, and the Control of Technical Expertise,” History of Science 39 (2001): 215-240
  • “‘A perfect and an absolute work’: Expertise, Authority, and the Rebuilding of Dover Harbor, 1579-1583,” Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 239-268

Research Description

My main research areas are in British history, and the history of science and technology. I focus on the early modern period (16th-17th centuries), and I have been most interested in the notion of expertise--what it means to be an expert in early modern Europe, and the role that experts played in the formation of early modern states and empires. My current book project is on land reclamation in 17th-century England, and so I have also developed an interest in environmental history.

Affiliated Departments