
Maria Avxentevskaya
Affiliated Scholar (Nov 2022-Apr 2024)
Dr.
Room B18/004
Maria Avxentevskaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and her main research interests concern the pre-modern history of scientific humanism, translation, and communication. She received her doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin (2015, with distinction) for her dissertation entitled “How to discover things with words? John Wilkins: from inventio to invention.” Her research has been supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and Herzog August Bibliothek.
Maria’s current book project entitled “The Physician’s Album Amicorum: Humanist Cultures of Knowledge Networking” explores the practices associated with the genre of medical “travelling friendship books,” cabinets of curiosity on paper—handwritten compilations of notes, quotes, drawings and prints. Humanist networking existed alongside the ars apodemica, “the art of learned travel,” and the albums were protected from the vulnerabilities of travel with embossed bindings and cases. Nowadays they offer abundant evidence of the intellectual networks within the medical and artisanal cultures of early modernity. This study employs cutting-edge technologies for network visualization.
Maria’s second project entitled “Learned in Translation: Administering the Early Russian Empire” examines the production of bureaucratic knowledge through language reforms and technical translation under Tsar Peter I of Russia, a reputed reformer of the early Russian state. The study examines individual cognitive tasks in translation, the normative documents based on translations from German and Dutch, and governmental practices which employed translated legal terminology. By reconstructing Petrine complex endeavor in translation between languages, technologies, and administrative models, this research seeks clarify what was learned in this translation, and to explore the phenomenon of linguistic sustainability in producing knowledge from experience, across cultures, and along historical timelines.
Projects
Premodern History of Signification: Putting Experiences into Words, Images, and Signs
Upcoming Events
Seminar
Liber Nemroth
MORESeminar
Title TBC
MORESeminar
Science, Art, Both, or Neither? The Geopolitics of Disciplinary Canons
MORESeminar
Sources of the Critical Edition of Ibn al-Jazzār’s Medical Handbook
MORESeminar
Sanskrit into Arabic: On the Reception of Ayurvedic Medicine in Early Abbasid Society
MOREPast Events
Research Seminar
Early Science in Conversation
MOREWorkshop
Introduction: Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia
MOREWorkshop
The Philology Workshop
MOREReading Group
Signification in Artificial Languages in Early Modern European Thought
MOREResearch Colloquium
"If You Cannot Travel, Read my Book:" Domesticating experiences in "A Treatyse of the Newe India" (1553)
MOREReading Group
Terms, Notions, and Imagery in Chinese Theories of Signification
MOREReading Group
Signification in Sanskrit and in the Indian Colonial Context
MOREReading Group
Experiences and Signification in Medieval Latin Natural Philosophy
MOREReading Group
Name, Thing Named, and Signification in Classic Islamic Theology
MOREReading Group
Signification in Ancient Greek Philosophy
MOREResearch Seminar
CANCELED: Premodern Conversations
MOREResearch Seminar
CANCELED: Premodern Conversations
MOREResearch Seminar
CANCELED: Premodern Conversations
MOREDigital Humanities Workshop
- Institute Event
Open Access
MOREResearch Seminar
CANCELED: Premodern Conversations
MOREResearch Seminar
Premodern Conversations
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