Black Representation Between Empire and Apothecary Culture in Late Medieval Europe My research at the Herzog August Bibliothek investigates the antecedents of what became the circulation of Black iconographies in European apothecary culture, grounded in the library’s rich manuscript and early printed holdings. The project examines pharmacological treatises, apothecary manuals, and commercial trade documents alongside […]
Mirabilia Siberica. Early Modern Animal Illustration as a Medium for Taming the Unknown My project investigates the role of illustrations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century publications on Siberian fauna, with a particular focus on how expanding exploration influenced the production and dissemination of zoological knowledge. By tracing how Siberian animals were depicted in early printed books, […]
The Influence of Translated European Medical Sources on Early Modern Ottoman and Arabic Writing Ibn Sallūm al-Ḥalabī (d. 1670) Ibn Sallūm al-Ḥalabī (d. 1670) drew in his medical writings on several European medical traditions, in particular those associated with Daniel Sennert (d. 1637) and Nicolaus Myrepsos. The proposed research at the HAB will examine the […]
My dissertation traces the circulation of German-language texts in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Focusing on the print publications of the Pennsylvania printer Johann Christoph Saur (born in 1695 in Ladenburg), who was one of the most successful and influential German printers in the Americas before the Age of Revolutions, I seek to uncover the multifaceted […]
Sklaven und Archive/ Deutsche Sklavenhalter und ihre Sklavinnen Ich arbeite an einem Buch zum Thema „Sklaven und Archive“. Das Buch soll die fundamentale Bedeutung von Kolonialarchiven und Bibliotheken für die Geschichte der atlantischen Sklaverei sowie der Versklavten nachweisen. Unter atlantischer Sklaverei verstehe ich in Afrika versklavte Menschen, die auf amerikanischen oder europäischen Schiffen über den […]
My current book project focuses on early modern philosophical arguments regarding what makes bodies individual. I aim to connect late 16th century metaphysical debates among Scholastic Aristotelian philosophers about the individuation of natural substances to the foundations laid by René Descartes’ and Thomas Hobbes’ new matter theories for modern views of what constitutes an individual […]
My dissertation investigates the sociocultural dynamics of early eighteenth-century German principalities by examining how princely Chinese rooms articulated power, prestige, and the construction of both the self and the “other.” Focusing on key examples, including Augustus II the Strong’s Japanese Palace, Frederick I of Prussia’s lacquer room in the Berlin Palace, and the porcelain room […]
The commandment to “love the neighbor as oneself” is central to Christianity. Yet the question “who is the neighbor?” rarely gets asked and the concept often acquires conflicting meanings and scopes. My project uses this open-ended notion as a lens for studying the scopes and boundaries of moral obligation and belonging in sixteenth-century German popular sources […]
In the twentieth century, modern dancers drew on the natural sciences to construct what they understood as essential bodily truths, imagining that their practices retrieved lost corporeal capacities still evident in supposedly “primitive” societies. My project investigates the earlier epistemic conditions that made such claims possible. I examine a corpus of writings produced during the colonization […]
My project is aimed at examining some exegetical hypotheses concerning the way John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) specifies the role God plays in the emergence of what is possible but not necessary. Some commentators claim that such a role must be minor, since possibility is a matter of logical consistency, and whatever is consistent is […]
