Jin-Woo Choi studies early modern European societies and cultures through the lens of environmental history. His current book project, The Cold Standard: The Great Winter of 1709 in European Experience and Memory, draws on sources from over 40 archives across Italy, Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and North America to examine various social levels of resilience and vulnerability to one of the harshest winters of the Little Ice Age. In addition to comparatively assessing the demographic and economic consequences of this cold spell in multiple regions, this research also demonstrates how the Winter of 1708-09 induced eighteenth-century contemporaries to search historical documents for comparably extreme weather events, and how 1709 itself later became the benchmark of hibernal severity in posterity.

Jin-Woo (pronounced, and occasionally written as 'Jinu', sans 'W') completed his Ph.D in History with a certificate in the History of Science at Princeton University, where he was the recipient of the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship. Prior to this, he received his M.Phil in Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in History from University College London, the final year of which he happily spent at the wonderful Warburg Institute across the street. His research in recent years has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Philosophical Society, the Folger Institute, and the Taylor-Wei Fellowship in the History of Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma.

Website: https://jinuchoi.com