Maria Avxentevskaya

Maria Avxentevskaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her main research interests concern the ways in which early modern knowledge "performed" itself through linguistic tropes, signature gestures, and defining rules and frameworks for scientific and philosophical discourse. She received her doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin, and her research has been supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Her current work concerns the early modern practices of knowledge networking through the genre of alba amicorum - collected volumes of manuscripts, drawings, and prints, often protected by elaborate leather cases, which were kept by physicians and medical students during their peregrinationes academicae across Europe and beyond. These albums distributed the heuristic values of an ingenious experimental enquiry, and became the Bilderfahrzeuge, in the terms of Aby Warburg, for cultivating the expert collective perception of significant details in knowledge historia. The study involves an extensive use of cutting-edge tools for digital network analysis and visualization.

Contact
Dr. Maria Avxentevskaya
History of Science
Email: [email protected]