My research concerns the courtly arts of England, France, and Burgundy in the period c. 1380–1500. Primarily, I work on poetry, and fifteenth-century developments in both the formal technique and transmission patterns of Anglophone and Francophone love-lyric: authors of particular interest include Charles d’Orléans, John Lydgate, Alain Chartier (and the querelle of the Belle dame sans mercy), Richard Roos, Michault Taillevent, Jacques Legrand, Christine de Pizan, and collected (pseudo-)Chauceriana. I am interested in shifting attitudes to artworks in this period, and reassessing the changes in procedures of representation they brought about, particularly the advent of naturalism and physiognomic likeness in the visual arts and literature. To do so, my research attempts to embrace a range of interaesthetic standpoints taken from, among others, bibliography and codicology, literary criticism and theory, rhetorical treatises and codifications, and art-historical method. More broadly, I am interested in the vernacular allegorical and lyrico-narrative literary traditions in England and France from the turn of the thirteenth century onwards; I am also preparing an edition of the Middle French apocalyptic treatise in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 134.

My research examines the global intellectual history of “mystical India.” I reconstruct how India came to be identified with mysticism and spirituality between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries—at once to sustain the mandates of imperial power and to formulate alternative universalisms that reimagined the social and political order. More broadly, I am interested in the intellectual and cultural history of Enlightenment and empire, as studied through a series of exceptions, limit-cases, and denied possibilities that invite us to re-theorize our generalizations. Ongoing projects include the circulation of early modern Jesuit missionary writings to Enlightenment and colonial contexts, citizenship debates and personal status law in British and French India, and the political thought of twentieth-century Indian feminists. 

My research lies at the intersection of economic history and labor economics. I use novel archival data, econometrics, and machine learning methods to address fundamental questions about historical labor market dynamics, inequality, and policy responses to economic crises. One strand of my work focuses on mass unemployment and labor market inequality, exploring how recessions shape economic disparities, how structural and technological change interact with cyclical downturns through labor reallocation across industries, and how policy responses mediate these effects. Another strand focuses on labor market structures and wages, analyzing how labor market organization and worker power have changed over time, how factors beyond day wages such as job quality and career trajectories shape workers’ experiences, and how we can better measure wages to understand historical living standards.

Website: www.meredithpaker.com