Jennifer Strtak

Jennifer Strtak is a historian of early modern technology, science, and the built environment, specializing in how technological artifacts shaped everyday life in urban spaces. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, The Driving Divide: The Carriage, Social Inequality, and Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris. This project examines how differing levels of access to passenger vehicles—and the ways they were used—reshaped both the built environment and the social fabric of Paris between 1650 and 1789. The book is both a social history of technology and a political history of environmental change, and it challenges conventional narratives of early modern mobility by revealing that vehicle use—far from simply facilitating circulation—also produced new forms of spatial inequality and urban constraint.

Prior to arrive at Middlebury in 2025, Strtak was a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University in May 2024. She obtained her MPhil in History from Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2016) and her BA with High Distinction from Trinity College, University of Toronto (2015). During the 2021-2022 academic year, Strtak was an invited Research Fellow at L’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.

Strtak teaches across a broad spectrum of early modern European history, offering courses that range from general surveys to specialized classes on scientific and medical practice, technology, and the dynamics of urban life.