Sean Takats

Sean Takats is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University and Director of Research Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His research focuses on early modern France, the Enlightenment, and the digital humanities. At the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Takats has directed Zotero, the popular research software platform, since 2006. He has also led other projects on text mining and the history of science. Takats is also currently co-director of The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, hosted at the University of Michigan. Takats is author of The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). His current research extends his interest in occupational expertise to the colonial world, where he explores the practices of collecting and synthesizing a wide range of exotic knowledge, ranging from botany to commerce to medicine.