Jacob Soll received his Diplôme d’Études Approfondies from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1993. He began his doctoral research in Paris, but eventually moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he finished his PhD in 1998. In 1997, while completing his doctorate, he began lecturing in the History Department at Princeton University, before coming to Rutgers in 1999.

Professor Soll’s work focuses on early modern political culture, information culture and the history of the book. His first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan, 2005), examines how humanist political culture–the ideas of “prudence” and “reason of state,” and the traditions surrounding Tacitus and Machiavelli–emerged as a tools of monarchical absolutism, but evolved into arms of radical, Enlightened political criticism. He has studied the influence of medical empiricism on French royal learned culture, and the relations between Portuguese, Dutch and Italian traditions of medical evidence and materia medica.  Professor Soll edited a special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas on “The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe.”  He is now writing a book entitled, Of Princes and Paperwork: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s State Information System, which studies the rise of the modern knowledgeable state, the origins of modern information culture and the idea of a “grand system” as opposed to a “grand strategy.” In addition, he and Professor Anthony Grafton are currently co-editing a collective  study on royal libraries.