Rachel Midura
- Department of History

220 Stanger St.
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Rachel Midura is a digital historian of early modern Europe specializing in the history of information. She researches the history of intelligence, travel, and statecraft in the information age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her first book, Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. It is available in paperback and as a free Open Access Ebook.
Rachel Midura is also the lead project investigator for Early Modern Digital Itineraries, which transforms early printed itinerary books to support new, data-driven approaches to the history of travel. She has recently published articles on Elizabethan espionage and transalpine surveillance, and is at work on a book about the history of conspiracy, assassination, and treason.
Media Mentions
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Article Item1869, Ep. 161 with Rachel Midura, author of Postal Intelligence , article
Cornell University Press Podcast, 3/14/25
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Article ItemA letter sealed for centuries has been read—without even opening it , article
Wall Street Journal, 3/2/2021