Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Sven Dupré

Research Group Director

Dr., Professor of History of Knowledge, Institute for Art History, Freie Universität Berlin

Residence: July 1, 2011 - September 30, 2016


Profile

Sven Dupré, previously Director of the Centre of History of Science at Ghent University, is Professor of History of Knowledge at the Institute for Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin and Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has held visiting positions at the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (Institute for Advanced Study) in Brussels, the Institute for History and Foundations of Science of the University of Utrecht, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney.

 He has published on a wide range of topics in the history of early modern science, technology and art in Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, the German lands, Britain and France. Recent publications include Silent Messengers (LIT, 2011) and From Earth-Bound to Satellite (Brill, 2011). A book on translation, language and knowledge, co-edited with Harold Cook (Brown University), is forthcoming.

 Sven Dupré is currently working on a monograph on Renaissance cultures of optics; an exhibition on art and alchemy at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and an edited book on laboratories of art; and a project (with Christine Göttler, University of Bern) on the collection of the Portuguese merchant-banker Emmanuel Ximenes in early seventeenth-century Antwerp.

 He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Nuncius, Science in Context and Studium, a former member of the advisory board of Isis, and a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d’ Histoire des Sciences in Paris. 


Selected publications

Sven Dupré. "Kepler’s optics without hypotheses. " Synthese 185 (3 2012)

Alison D. Morrison-Low, Sven Dupré, Stephen Johnston, Giorgio Strano (Editor/s). From Earth-Bound to Satellite: Telescopes, Skills and Networks. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011.

Sven Dupré, Christoph Lüthy (Editor/s). Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011.

Sven Dupré . "Trading Luxury Glass, Picturing Collections and Consuming Objects of Knowledge in Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp. " Intellectual History Review 20 (2010)

Talks and presentations

September 2012
„Galileo and the Culture of Glass“, Workshop: „Tintenfass und Teleskop. Galileo Galilei im Schnittpunkt wissenschaftlicher, literarischer und visueller Kulturen im europäischen 17. Jahrhundert / Calamaio e telescopio. Galileo Galilei al crocevia della cultura scientifica, letteraria e visuale del Seicento europeo", Villa Vigoni
May 2012
„Translating Knowledge and Materials in Early Modern Antwerp.“ Workshop: „Trading Values. Cultural Translation in Early Modern Antwerp“, University of Groningen
April 2012
“Optics and the Transformation of the Artist’s Workshop”, Office of the History of Science, University of Uppsala
April 2011
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 'Antonio Neri’s Art of Glass'
January 2011
[with Mark Clarke] “Artists’ Recipes. Between History of Science and Technical Art History”, Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts, Brussels

Teaching activities

WS 2012/13
FU Berlin, Seminar: The Material Culture of Knowledge: Objects of Art and Science in the Early Modern History of Collecting
SS 2012
FU Berlin, Seminar: Early Modern Art and Alchemy: Between Theory and Craft
WS 2011/12
FU Berlin, Seminar: Optics and Perspective in Early Modern Art