Stuart M. McManus is a scholar of Renaissance law and letters in global context. He currently teaches world history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also directs the Digital Humanities Initiative in the Research Institute for the Humanities.

As a historian of the global renaissance (c. 1350-1750), his work examines both the “brighter” and “darker” sides of this important early period of globalization, the histories of slavery, the spread of renaissance humanism and the connected histories of law and religion. 

Previously, McManus taught Mexican and ancient Mediterranean history at the University of Chicago, where he was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

He is currently completing his second book (under contract with Harvard University Press) on the global story underlying the famous 1619 slave voyage to Virginia. Several articles related to this project have appeared in leading journals, including Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and Gender & History.

McManus’s first book, on the global history of renaissance humanism (based on primary research in 13 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia), was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

In 2019, McManus was on leave at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, and in 2021, he was a visiting fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He was the 2021 winner of the Royal Historical Society’s David Berry Prize.

He is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Latino Studies, Catholic Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, and other similar publications. 

McManus received his PhD from Harvard University.