Tracy Wietecha

Tracy Wietecha is a postdoctoral fellow in the Max Planck Working Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body,” specializing in medieval philosophy and the history of premodern science and philosophy.

Tracy was the 2020 Lorenz Bausch fellow at the Leopoldina National Academy of Science in Halle (Saale), Germany. She completed her doctorate in February 2021 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München with a dissertation on the ethical commentaries of the thirteenth-century natural scientist and philosopher Albert the Great. She holds an MA in philosophy from Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and an MA in sacred theology from Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit, Michigan).

Tracy’s current research examines how German scientists encountered the Latin Americas. She also organizes a working group that brings together scholars from the MPIWG and the Leopoldina, “Experiencing Nature through Old and New Epistemes around the Globe.” Tracy has taught courses at the LMU and Bard College Berlin. She is currently a guest lecturer at the Technische Universität Berlin. In the upcoming semester she will teach the course “Exploring the Roots: A History of Botany from Antiquity to Early Modernity.” Tracy serves as the Spokesperson for the Max Planck Society PostdocNet.

Publications

•  "Losing Foreignness: Johann Sigismund Elsholtz on the Meaning of Plants in the Pleasure Gardens of Berlin," Notes and Records, 28 Februrary 2024.

• “On Method in Reading the De ente et essentia,” International Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2016), 155-170.

• “Albert the Great’s Ethical Commentaries and Al-Farabi’s De Intellectu.”  In Homo – Natura – Mundus: Human Beings and their Relationships. Proceedings to XIV SIEPM International Congress, ed. Roberto Hofmeister Pich. Brepols, 2020: 339–350.

• Katja Krause and Tracy Wietecha, “Albert the Great on Negative-Mystical.

  Theology as the Summit of Science,” Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology. Oxford University Press (in press).