In this session of “10 Questions for the Historian of Science,” I asked Maria Avxentevskaya about her approach to studying the history of science. Dr Avxentevskaya is also a member of the ASTRA working group Performative Philology: Crafting Knowledge in Action.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Maria Avxentevskaya: My name is Maria Avxentevskaya (publishing as Maria Auxent), and I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London. My academic background spans philology, philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of science. Since 2016, I have also been fortunate to work on various projects at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I completed my PhD at Freie Universität Berlin in 2015 with a dissertation on the early Royal Society of London, focusing on their manner of discourse and John Wilkins’s artificial language project. I am now finishing a monograph on rhetoric and persuasion in early modern English science. I really enjoy teaching and have tried my hand at science journalism and science fiction writing. For further details about my research and publications, please see my Warburg Institute webpage.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in it?
Maria Avxentevskaya: I approach science and medicine as inherently communicative processes that unfold across intellectual, cognitive, social, bodily, and material dimensions. Accordingly, my work in the history and philosophy of science and medicine focuses on scientific language and communication, with particular attention to humanism, rhetoric, semiotics, translation, and the networks and institutions through which knowledge is made and circulated.
My interest in science began with astronomy. When I was growing up, I loved popular science books and was fascinated by descriptions of the universe as infinite. I knew very little about the philosophical pedigree of this problem but remember wondering what it could actually mean for something to have no boundary, and how anyone could comprehend infinity. Over time, my interest turned from the boundaries of the universe to the frontiers of our own understanding. I became curious about how scientific knowledge is made through observation, discussion, interpretation, collaboration, disagreement, writing, translation, and persuasion—all practices that depend on signs and shared meanings. This drew me towards the history and philosophy of science, particularly the language of science and how meaning is made in scientific inquiry. I am now interested in how language and other sign systems enable us to transform experience into knowledge that can be put to good use.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Maria Avxentevskaya: I am particularly interested in sources that make you say, “Yes, but not quite.” They seem to belong to a familiar category but then slip between labels. In my first project at the MPIWG, I worked on the alba amicorum, or friendship albums, kept by medical students travelling across early modern Europe. These manuscripts have been described as cabinets of curiosity on paper or early forms of social networking. Their owners collected quotations, emblems, drawings, and autographs from peers, professors, artisans, and patrons. The albums brought together witty banter, humanist learning, artwork, and travel imagery. Such sources reveal experiences that people did not articulate in fixed categories—sometimes for good reasons—and show how they navigated turbulent times and appreciated the beauty of life’s changing spectacles.
Finding sources is scholarly detective work but also a little like meeting new friends: you need to follow your curiosity and pay attention. I first encountered alba amicorum in an exhibition at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. I have discovered other sources in museums, auction records, antiquarian bookshops, and through conversations with colleagues.
When working with historical sources, I try to bridge the distance between their world and ours without erasing the differences. I encourage my students to do the same. Together we ask: What did these authors mean? What logic or experience stood behind their words? What were they trying to do by saying what they said? And what did their work accomplish?
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Maria Avxentevskaya: I situate my work primarily in the early modern history of science and medicine and, across a broader temporal span, in the history and philosophy of scientific language and communication. I am interested in how scientific experience becomes intelligible, information becomes communicable, and knowledge becomes persuasive: how signs acquire meaning, concepts move between languages and disciplines, knowledge circulates through networks, and scientific arguments persuade their audiences. This brings my work into conversation with philosophy, philology, rhetoric, semiotics, translation studies, social studies of science, and relevant fields in the natural sciences.
My broader interest in scientific language and communication comes into sharper focus in my monograph-in-progress, Rhetoric and Persuasion in Early Modern English Science. It builds on existing scholarship on the rhetoric of science but shifts attention from rhetoric as a repertoire of eloquent techniques to persuasion as an inherent part of scientific practice. The book examines the tension between emerging early modern ideals of scientific method and the persuasive dimension of scientific rationality. Persuasion does not merely present scientific knowledge in a favorable light after it has been produced; rather, it forms part of the construction of scientific arguments through the selection of evidence, negotiation of uncertainty, establishment of credibility, and pursuit of common assent. In other words, persuasion belongs to the making of knowledge about nature. I analyze how early modern naturalists understood persuasion to be both necessary and dangerous, and how this awareness shaped their inquiries.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Maria Avxentevskaya: The history of science is continually transforming, but I think the process is especially visible at present. Like many other fields of knowledge, it is expanding its geographical scope, developing new methods, revisiting its categories, and becoming more conscious of its public role. Geographical expansion entails more than adopting a global view of scientific knowledge and practice. As James Secord argued in his 2025 BSHS presidential address, histories should be relational rather than all-seeing, tracing the movement, conflict, and exchange of knowledge about nature across regions and scales. This places science within wider contexts of public policy, institutions, diplomacy, environmental change, religion, social movements, and the often-invisible everyday labor sustaining knowledge-making.
Close archival work remains essential, but it is increasingly connected to larger systems and longer histories. Digital tools can analyze large datasets, while multimedia formats reveal previously unseen relationships. This broader relational perspective extends to the field’s own categories, including “science” itself: scholars examine what has counted as scientific knowledge alongside artisanal expertise, Indigenous traditions, everyday know-how, and other forms of knowing, while asking who has held the authority to define knowledge. Finally, the field seems to be taking a more public-facing role in debates about nature and technology. At the 2026 HSS–ESHS conference in Edinburgh, I was struck by discussions stressing the importance of addressing policy issues through dialogue with communities and institutions. To me, the field is increasingly focused on the epistemic relationships through which knowledge is made, put to use, and carried forward.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Maria Avxentevskaya: History gives knowledge the dimension of time: it allows us to look beneath the surface of present-day science and technology and see how they emerged through arguments, interpretations, failures, and individual and collective efforts. This provides a form of human self-understanding with scientific, political, and educational value. The question has a historiography of its own. For example, the 2008 Isis Focus section, “What Is the Value of History of Science?” examined how historical perspectives inform scientific and medical research, public understanding, and the education of future scientists and physicians. History enables us to recognize as historical what might otherwise appear self-evident or natural. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have historicized scientific categories and changing standards of knowledge. Hasok Chang has shown how recovering forgotten experiments, concepts, and practices can enrich science’s repertoire of possibilities. Ann Blair has brought to light the agency of amanuenses and other collaborators whose contributions are often hidden in retrospective narratives of authorship and discovery. Initiatives such as the British Academy’s Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy show how history can inform policy. A historical perspective helps explain how science earns trust: not only through its methods, but also through institutionalized criticism, pluralistic debate, and communal scrutiny. Finally, history expands our vision of possible futures. François Jacob described the laboratory as “a machine for making the future.” Studying science’s history helps us see where we stand on the trajectory from our past towards the scientific and technological future we aspire to create.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Maria Avxentevskaya: My current MSCA project, “The Word and the Brain: Rhetorical Persuasion in Soul and Body,” explores how eloquent speech was thought to affect the body and brain. The power of words is not a metaphor: the bodily effects of eloquence, as part of the mind–body relationship, have long been debated in philosophy and medicine, including discussions of prayer and meditation. Modern psychology and neuroscience likewise investigate how verbal suggestion may influence neuroplasticity and bodily healing. My project explores this question across early modern rhetoric, theological anthropology, natural philosophy, psychology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology. These fields often overlapped: treatises ostensibly about rhetoric could examine the psychology and physiology of emotion because persuasion was thought to stir the passions, move the bodily humors, and affect the body and brain.
The project is relevant to today’s increasingly AI-mediated environments, where emotional persuasion raises difficult questions about truth and ethics. We clearly need stronger mental-health education and literacy, especially among young people, who may encounter unreliable advice and untested approaches to psychological difficulties online. In this regard, my research offers not clinical instruction but historical and critical foundations by historicizing categories of mental life and showing how people have interpreted emotion and persuasion through historically contingent languages. I also hope it can help move public discussion towards fuller recognition of mental health as a human rights concern. Emotional well-being cannot be guaranteed, but the conditions that support it deserve stronger protection as part of the right to the highest attainable standard of mental health.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Maria Avxentevskaya: History is full of unusual stories—and they are among the engines of research because they can illuminate larger developments. The MPIWG volume Surprise: 107 Variations on the Unexpected (2019), published in honor of Lorraine Daston, even offered a phenomenology of the unexpected in scientific knowledge-making. I love sharing such stories with students. Sometimes they offer a powerful vision of the future from deep within the past—in 1640, the young John Wilkins, later one of the founders of the Royal Society of London, published the first technical reckoning of moon travel. Sometimes the fate of historical sources encapsulates an era—one happy-go-lucky Berlin student kept an album amicorum, which his descendants lovingly passed down from generation to generation until the young man who was meant to inherit it fell in a senseless war on foreign soil, and the bereaved family donated the album to a library. Sometimes such stories change our perception of a dominant narrative—the relationship between premodern Russia and Western Europe has often been viewed as one of profound distrust. Yet when plague engulfed London in 1665, news of the epidemic spread across Europe through information networks, including diplomatic channels and Russian periodicals compiled from translations of Western newspapers. This information helped prompt Tsar Alexis of Russia to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors and adopt prophylactic measures discussed in the Western press, thereby likely saving thousands of lives. In history, the usual and the unusual are often but facets of the same gem.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Maria Avxentevskaya: My longer-term goal is to establish a research group on the history and philosophy of science communication. Its premise would be that scientific language and communication are integral to how knowledge is made, circulated, trusted, and acted upon. Science communication with publics, research communication among scientists, and public-facing communication by technology companies are rapidly expanding spheres of scientific, educational, civic, and commercial activity. They operate across disciplines, between experts and institutions, and increasingly through AI systems. Although science communication has often been approached primarily as a practical field, its expanding role makes it an urgent object of historical and philosophical inquiry. AI-mediated environments are transforming how scientific claims are generated, distributed, and received, raising questions about truth, ethics, human cognition, and the public interest. No single discipline can fully address these developments, which also exceed any individual researcher’s expertise. We need history to trace change across the longue durée; philosophy to examine evidence and justification; linguistics and rhetoric to analyze expression and persuasion; and the social sciences to understand institutions, publics, information channels, and trust. The group could investigate changing standards of objectivity, credibility, and persuasion; how new media shape the reception of expertise; AI systems as communicative intermediaries; historical changes in how people cognitively and emotionally process scientific and technological information; and the consequences of such communication for physical and mental health, including access to healthcare and health information. This program would advance the public interest and the history and philosophy of science.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Maria Avxentevskaya: The history of science will continue seeking new sources, methods, and forms of presentation. New sources and technologies often go hand in hand. For example, the Hidden in Plain Sight project at Queen Mary University of London uses 3D microscopy and DNA analysis to study premodern objects. AI-powered digital humanities may allow historians to examine evidence across previously unattainable scales, while multimedia and virtual reality may help represent embodied practices that resist textual description. In this regard, I am fortunate to collaborate with the ASTRA Research Group at the MPIWG on Performative Philology: Crafting Knowledge in Action, which develops multimedia approaches to studying knowledge practices in action.
More significant still may be the field’s expanding role in public life and human welfare. Historians could contribute more actively to policy discussions concerning AI, biotechnology, climate change, and public health by revealing precedents, forgotten alternatives, and hidden assumptions. Alongside using AI, they could historicize its concepts, promises, biases, and social consequences. The field might also historicize changing ideas of what it means to be human and how societies imagine and choose their futures.
Science fiction provides a conceptual laboratory for imagining institutions that can turn technological possibilities into sustainable action. For example, the speculative vision of near-total digital memory raises the question of how to create archives for future historians that preserve data and record abandoned approaches and ethical decisions. The field might also take a more interactive turn through forms of collective intelligence: projects in which communities contribute expertise, local knowledge, and interpretation. Would you like to be part of such an interactive history of science?
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you, Maria! We will pose that question to our readers.