Mr Tom Joashi

Mr Tom Joashi is a Bye-Fellow at Magdalene.

Mr Tom Joashi began his undergraduate studies in French and German at Magdalene College in 2017, concentrating on the literatures of the medieval and early modern periods. As part of his degree, he spent a year at the University of Vienna as an Erasmus student, where he studied Germanistik. He graduated with a starred first in 2021.

In 2022, he returned to Cambridge, this time to King’s College, as a recipient of a Cambridge Trust Scholarship for the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies. His thesis examined Protestant experience in early modern Paris, and he graduated with distinction, also receiving the Department’s Dalibor Vesely Prize for Humanities research in architecture.

He subsequently returned to Magdalene to begin doctoral studies funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme. His PhD is supervised jointly by Dr Maximilian Sternberg in Architecture and Dr Tim Chesters in French. In his first year, he was awarded a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard University, spending the 2024–25 academic year as a visiting fellow, working between the Graduate School of Design and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Mr Joashi’s research investigates urbanism in late Renaissance Paris during the early Wars of Religion. He is particularly interested in the ways ideas of the ‘ideal city’ in sixteenth-century Europe were bound up with religious violence. His work centres on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, challenging the conventional view that Parisian modernisation only began under Henri IV after peace had been restored. Instead, he analyses the celebratory visual and textual responses to the massacre to suggest that, for many radicals, Paris had never seemed more perfect than in its bloodiest moment.

Research Interests

Tom’s academic interests lie primarily in the Protestant Reformation, the urbanism and architecture of the European Renaissance, and contemporary theoretical approaches to urban conflict.

Qualifications

• MA Modern and Medieval Languages (Cantab)
• MPhil Architecture and Urban Studies (Cantab)

Career/Research Highlights

• Kurt Hahn Prize 2021
• D. H. Green Prize 2021
• Dalibor Vesely Prize 2023
• Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship 2024-2025