js4744@princeton.edu
Jennifer Strtak is a historian specializing in the built environment and technology of the early modern world. Her current research redefines the carriage’s historical significance, challenging the conventional view of it as merely a symbol of elite luxury and conspicuous consumption. In her forthcoming monograph, Routes of Power: Mobility, Social Inequality, and Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris, Strtak explores how vehicles catalyzed change in early modern urban environments and the mechanisms through which this transformation unfolded.
Strtak’s work reexamines the carriage as a pivotal element in urban history, illustrating how it reinforced and entrenched uneven power dynamics and social inequalities within Paris’s urban fabric between 1650 and 1789. Her research draws on municipal ordinances, legal records, financial accounts, guidebooks, and visual representations to demonstrate how, for instance, the transformation of walking spaces to accommodate wheeled traffic occurred alongside the covert use of carriages by police to transport the poor to prisons for colonial deportation. Drawing on examples like these, as well as cases illustrating the changing treatment of animals and gender dynamics, her work underscores the contentious role of early modern vehicles and invites us to reconsider several key aspects of urban life, including bureaucratic control, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, urban infrastructure development, and the freedoms and constraints on everyday human movement.
Prior to arriving at Princeton University, Strtak earned her PhD in History at Yale University (2024). She obtained her MPhil in History from Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2016) and her BA from Trinity College, University of Toronto (2015). During the 2021-2022 academic year, Strtak was an invited Research Fellow at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris. Her research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada as well as the Fox International Fellowship Program.
In Spring 2025 she will teach a new seminar titled, City and Nature: Urban Nature and Society, 1450-1800.
Strtak’s fellowship is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Princeton University Humanities Council, and the Department of Art & Archeology.
