Hannah Johnston
Hannah Johnston is a historian of early modern Europe. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and labor in early modern Italy, primarily through the history of sex work. Her teaching focuses more broadly on the cultural and social history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, labor, and urban history. She also has experience teaching premodern global history and the history of science and medicine.
Her first book project, Go-Betweens: Sex, Gender, and Labor in Early Modern Italy, examines the wide-ranging and often nebulous roles played by procurers and procuresses in the sex industries of early modern Italian cities, in particular Rome and Venice. Drawing on criminal, legal, parochial, and notarial records as well as printed and visual materials, she explores how go-betweens—a majority of whom were women—were essential brokers of society, connecting sex workers to each other, to their clients, to other professions, and to the urban environment writ large. She argues that these often-ignored but substantially important subjects reveal new information about how sex industries developed in early modern Italian cities and offer broader insight into the working lives of early modern women.
Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Europe Center at Stanford University, the Notre Dame Global Gateway Rome Archive Seminar, and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Hannah has taught on a variety of subjects both at Stanford and elsewhere. In 2023, she designed and taught a seminar at Stanford on “The Spirit in Motion: Desire in Early Modern Europe,” which was awarded the department’s annual prize for Best Graduate Student Taught and Designed Course. She also served as a teaching assistant for courses on early modern global history, the Scientific Revolution, and the history of human trafficking. In Fall 2024, she taught “Early Modern Europe: 1450-1789” at CUNY City College of New York through the Stanford-CUNY Graduate Teaching Exchange. In Fall 2026, Hannah will be teaching “Global Challenges from a Historical & Social Perspective” in the Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies at the School of Professional Studies at New York University. The course explores topics in global history from antiquity to the present.
In addition to her scholarly work, Hannah is also a research coordinator, editor, and writer on the chart-topping iHeartMedia history podcast “Noble Blood,” hosted by Dana Schwartz. Her writing credits include the episodes “The Venetian Doge Condemned in Memory,” “The Thousand-Day Conclave,” “The Nun of Monza (Parts 1 and 2),” and “The Execution of the Roman Virgin.”