Konrad enters the PhD program in History at Harvard with a BA in Renaissance Studies from the University of Toronto with minors in Medieval Studies and Latin. He studies renaissance humanism in Florence and its expression in the overlapping domains of theology and politics. He is interested in the various “medieval renaissances”—earlier moments in Europe but also Asia and Africa where historians detect an efflorescence of literary pursuits—and gauging the extent to which the humanists of the fifteenth-century borrowed ideas from earlier intellectual cultures. Studying the Renaissance is attractive to Konrad as a powerful example for how ideas have an impact on our culture even across large gaps of time and space.