Ray
Schrire

Dr. Ray Schrire is a new faculty member in the Department of General History at Tel Aviv University.

His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, fusing methods from book history with models from cognitive science.

As an Azrieli Fellow, Ray will look at the social, mental, and material lives of a multitude of historical agents who depended on manipulating numbers to make their living: merchants, accountants, and housewives. While the numerical practice of these early modern groups is largely obscure, popular numeracy is often regarded as a precondition for a capitalist economy and mentality, the trigger for modern mathematics, and the engine of colonialism and slavery. Ray’s research thus aims to examine how “big” historical shifts relate to the “small” everyday lives of individuals, whose shopping bills and accounting books are often their only mark in history.

Ray received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he enjoyed the close mentorship and inspiring teaching of Prof. Dror Wahrman, Dr. Ayelet Even-Ezra, and Prof. Raz Chen-Morris. As an exchange student at University of California, Berkeley, Ray came across the blotted schoolbook of a seventeenth- century schoolboy doing his best to learn Latin. This odd finding led him to devote a decade to studying the history of grammar school education through hundreds of manuscripts and printed books in dozens of libraries across the world. During his postdoctoral studies at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, another curious manuscript shifted his attention from literacy to numeracy. Ray lives in Jerusalem with his partner, Ella, and their two daughters: Naomi, who is confounded by numbers, and Layla, who is puzzled by language.