Maria Avxentevskaya

Maria Avxentevskaya (Auxent) specializes in the premodern history of science and medicine and the longue durée history of scientific communication, including humanism, semiotics, translation, rhetoric, persuasion, and networking. She received her doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin (2015, with distinction) for her dissertation “How to Discover Things with Words? John Wilkins: From Inventio to Invention.” Her research has been supported by the Max Planck Society, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the Warburg Institute.

Maria is currently working on the monograph Rhetoric and Persuasion in Early Modern English Science. Her publications include the forthcoming Signs and Signification in a Global Comparative Perspective, co-edited with Glenn W. Most (Brill, 2024) and Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation, co-edited with Katja Krause and Dror Weil (Routledge, 2022). Maria’s other projects include “The Word and the Brain: Early Modern Neuroscience of Rhetoric and Persuasion” and “The Physician’s Album Amicorum: Humanist Cultures of Knowledge Networking.” She has taught science communication, early modern science, and knowledge in translation at Bard College Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Sydney. Her science journalism pieces have been republished by the Independent and Scientific American.