Jonathan Nathan joined New College as a non-Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow in 2025. A native of New York City, he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 2015 with a degree in history. He went on to study at the University of Cambridge, where he received an MPhil in 2016 and a PhD in 2022, both times in history. He was then a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public and International Law in Heidelberg, before moving to Oxford in 2023 to be a Research Fellow at the Pharos Foundation, an appointment he still holds.

Research interests

Jonathan works on many aspects of intellectual history from the sixteenth century to the present, with a special focus on sixteenth-century French literature and the history of philology. He has also written a few pieces of textual criticism, primarily dealing with ancient Latin sources. He is busy now on four major projects: 1) A book arising from his doctoral dissertation tracing the 500-year history of the Cymbalum mundi (1537) by Bonaventure Des Periers, which has long been (falsely) believed to conceal a secret atheist or otherwise subversive message. 2) An essay in book-form on Biblical justifications for religious intolerance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 3) A descriptive bibliography of Mare liberum and De jure belli ac pacis by the Dutch author Hugo Grotius. 4) A series of studies on the circulation of Horatian manuscripts in the early-modern period.

Selected Publications

• ‘Reconstructing Pliny’s Comment on Apion Plistonices (Nat. Praef. 25)’. Mnemosyne 78, no. 1 (2025): 89–112. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568525x-bja10246.
• 'Un Arnétois à Bâle. Lieu de naissance de Bonaventure Des Périers'. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 86, nos 2–3 (2024): 329–38.
• 'Les Nouvelles récréations (1558) ne sont pas de Bonaventure Des Périers († 1544)'. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85, no. 3 (2023): 601–33.
• 'The Nature and Sources of Rabelais’ Hebrew Learning'. The Sixteenth Century Journal 54, nos 1–2 (2023): 41–72.
• 'Transposition at Virgil, Aeneid 8.612–13'. The Classical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2023): 937–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838823000071.
• 'Virgil’s Melior … Sed Construction'. Classical Philology 118, no. 2 (2023): 256–60. https://doi.org/10.1086/723826.
• 'The Meaning and Syntax of Taʿărōg'. Vetus Testamentum 71, nos 4–5 (2021): 665–72. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685330-00001142.