Pál Ács (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Pál Ács is Vice-Head of the Center of Renaissance Studies, Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He graduated in Hungarian and Russian literature from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, and obtained his PhD at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of two volumes on early modern Hungarian literary history, Az idő ósága—Történetiség és történetszemlélet a régi magyar irodalomban [The Antiquity of Time: Historicity and Historical Vision in Ancient Hungarian Literature] (2002) and Elváltozott idők [Changed Times] (2006), as well as a large number of articles and book chapters, among them: ‘Hungarian Friends of Erasmus in the Sixteenth Century and Today’, in Arnoud Visser, ed., In Search of the Republic of Letters: Intellectual Relations between Hungary and The Netherlands 1500–1800 (1999), 21–28; ‘The Names of the Holy Maccabees: Erasmus and the Origin of the Hungarian Protestant Martirology’, in Marcell Sebők, ed., Republic of Letters, Humanism, Humanities (2005), 45−62; ‘Historischer Skeptizismus und Frömmigkeit. Die Revision protestantischer Geschichtsvorstellungen in den Predigten des ungarischen Jesuiten Péter Pázmány’, in Anna Ohlidal and Stefan Samerski, eds, Jesuitische Frömmigkeitskulturen. Konfessionelle Interaktion in Ostmitteleuropa 1570–1700 (2006), 279–94; ‘The Reception of Erasmianism in Hungary and the Contexts of Erasmian Program. The “Cultural Patriotism” of Benedek Komjáti’, in Balázs Trencsényi, Márton Zászkaliczky, eds, Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States, National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe, Studies in the History of Political Thought, 3 (Brill: Leiden, 2010), 75−90.
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Maria Rosa Antognazza (King’s College London)
Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Her research interests lie in the history of philosophy (especially early modern and G. W. Leibniz) and in the philosophy of religion (especially religious epistemology, metaphysical issues in philosophical theology, and the philosophical and theological foundations of religious toleration). Her main contributions in these areas to date are two substantial monographs: 1) a full-scale intellectual biography of Leibniz which covers the development of Leibniz’s thought over the entire span of his intellectual endeavours, including logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, theology, mathematics, and physics (Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 651 pp.); 2) a study of the relationship between philosophy and revealed theology in Leibniz, which tackles a broad range of issues in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics (Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, 348 pp.). In addition she has edited texts by H. Grotius, J. H. Alsted and G. W. Leibniz and has published a number of articles in refereed journals and collective volumes.
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Erik-Jan Bos (University of Utrecht)
Erik-Jan Bos (MA, PhD) is Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Utrecht University. Within his main field of research interest, seventeenth-century philosophy, his publications focus on Descartes’s works and correspondence, Dutch Cartesianism, and the Republic of Letters. Currently he is preparing a new and critical edition of Descartes’s correspondence. A recent area of interest concerns the Digital Humanities. He is member of the steering committee of the Dutch project ‘Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic: A Web-Based Humanities’ Collaboratory on Correspondences’, and participates in the development and testing of the relevant tools.
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Pavlína Cermanová (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Pavlína Cermanová has an MA in History from Charles University Prague, where she will defend her doctoral dissertation on ‘The Apocalyptic Visions of the Hussite Period’ in September 2010. She has published on aspects of early modern apocalypticism in a wide variety of Czech-, German-, and Italian-language publications.
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Michał Choptiany (Jagiellonian University)
Michał Choptiany (b. 1984), Polish philologist and philosopher, is a PhD candidate at the Department of Old Polish Literature in the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His dissertation is devoted to Petrus Ramus’s and Audomarus Talaeus’s rhetorical theory and its application and reception in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is a research and publications secretary of the Committee on the Study of Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies ‘Artes Liberales’ (University of Warsaw), a secretary of the board of the Polish Journal of Philosophy (Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University) and Autopotret quarterly (Malopolska Institute of Culture in Kraków). He was awarded Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, Stanisław Estreicher, and Florentyna Kogutowska scholarships. In May 2010 he was a Junior Visiting Research Associate at the Modern European History Research Centre at the University of Oxford. His interests cover history of rhetoric, old Polish literature, early modern culture, history of ideas, history of Humanism and Reformation, and philosophy and theology.
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Virginia Dillon (University of Oxford)
Virginia Dillon is currently pursuing a DPhil at the University of Oxford where she researches news networks between Transylvania and the Holy Roman Empire during the early to mid-seventeenth century. She previously completed a Bachelor’s degree at Clemson University, South Carolina, and a Master’s Degree at the University of Chicago, where she considered representations of Bethlen Gábor in the English corantos of the 1620s. She is presently continuing her research at Uppsala University, Sweden.
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Christof Ginzel (University of Giessen)
Christof Ginzel (MA, PhD) studied and researched at Bonn, Lampeter, Heidelberg, and Aberdeen. He is an associate member of the DFG Graduate School ‘Transnational Media Events’ of the University of Giessen. His research interests lie in English and Neo-Latin literature; European politics and historiography in the early modern period; matter and motif history; and the English novel in general. Having completed a dissertation on the poetry written on the occasion of the Palatine Marriage in 1613 (Poetry, Politics and Promises of Empire Prophetic Rhetoric in the English and Neo-Latin Epithalamia on the occasion of the Palatine Marriage in 1613: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) he has started to work on his postdoctoral thesis on the country parson in English literature and culture.
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George Gömöri (University of Cambridge)
George Gömöri is a Hungarian-born scholar, poet and translator now living in London. From 1969 to 2001 he taught Polish and Hungarian literature at the University of Cambridge where he was Fellow of Darwin College. His publications include numerous books in English and Hungarian, the latest of which was Kultúránk követei a régi Európában (Envoys of our Culture in Old Europe, Editio Princeps, 2009) dealing mostly with Anglo-Hungarian relations and cultural exchanges in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
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Jo Hedesan (University of Exeter)
Jo Hedesan is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter in UK, where she is preparing a dissertation on the Christian Philosophy of Belgian physician and alchemist Johan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644). She has previously concluded a dual Bachelor’s degree in History and Economics at the University of Nevada (USA) and a MA in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include Paracelsian and Helmontian alchemy and medicine, Helmontian influences in England and the continent, the Hartlib circle and other pre-Royal Society groups, as well as Renaissance natural magic and prisca theologia. She has recently presented papers on the alchemy of the Hartlib circle (Royal Society conference) and the Biblical interpretation of women in Van Helmont’s thought (Society of Renaissance Studies conference).
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Martin Holý (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Martin Holý is a Research Fellow of the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and external lecturer at the Institute of Bohemian History at Charles University Prague. His research interests focus on early modern intellectual and educational history. He is currently working on a book entitled Private Tutors of Bohemian and Moravian Nobility in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. He is an author of the monograph Birth of the Renaissance Cavalier: Upbringing and Education of Nobility from the Bohemian Lands at the Threshold of Modern Age (1500-1620) (May 2010 [in Czech]). He is a Vice Editor-in-Chief of the Folia Historica Bohemica (a journal focused on early modern history, published by the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague).
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Howard Hotson (University of Oxford)
Howard Hotson, Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History, is co-organiser of the conference and Project Director of its umbrella initiative Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters. He has published (inter alia) an intellectual biography of Comenius’s teacher, Johann Heinrich Alsted (OUP, 2000), and a survey of central European Reformed educational theory and practice (Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630, OUP, 2007), both of which interrelate the histories of science, philosophy, religion, and education and ground them in concrete historical contexts. He is currently editing a survey of the correspondence network of Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), completing a study of the international diaspora of Reformed intelligentsia during the Thirty Years War, and organising a series of workshops on seventeenth-century intellectual networks in the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian Academies of Science, which will have culminated in this conference.
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Steffen Huber (Jagiellonian University)
Steffen Huber studied philosophy and philology at the University of Vienna and holds a PhD from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, where he is teaching history of philosophy. His doctoral dissertation, defended in 2003, concerned the Religio rationalis of the Polish antitrinitarian Andreas Wissowatius and Leibniz’s response to the former’s syllogisms on Trinity. His main interests lie in early modern Polish philosophy with a focus on social thought and metaphysics. He is a member of the board of the Archive of the History of Philosophy and Social Thought (Archiwum Historii Filozofii i Myśli Społecznej, Warsaw, Poland) and cooperating with the Yearbook of Polish Philosophy (Rocznik Filozofii Polskiej, Warsaw, Poland). He also translates contemporary Polish philosophy into German.
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Jana Hubková (Municipal Museum, Ústi nad Labem)
Jana Hubková (Municipal Museum, Ústí nad Labem) studied German and History at the University J. E. Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem. She received her doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague (2006) for a dissertation based on the broadsheets of the Thirty Years War, concerning primarily Frederick V, Elector Palatine. She is the author of the monograph Frederick V in the Light of Broadsheet Publications (Prague 2010, 1002 pp., in Czech). She is currently cooperating with Vladimír Urbánek on a research project at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague entitled ‘Revelation, Prophecy and Eschatological Expectations in the Czech Protestant Thought of the Seventeenth Century’, and is in the course of preparing an edition and interpretation of the prophecies issued, copied, and read by the Czech Protestant exiles from the 1620s until the 1660s.
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Gábor Kármán (GWZO, Leipzig)
Gábor Kármán is a research fellow at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (Leipzig). He defended a PhD dissertation in 2009 at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) about the foreign policy of Transylvania in the mid-seventeenth century, with a special focus on the changes in its confessional character. In the program of Central European University (Budapest) he recently finished another dissertation, a biography of a seventeenth-century diplomat and Turcologist, Jakab Harsányi Nagy. His main research interests are the social and cultural history of early modern east central European diplomacy and a comparative approach in the study of the tributary states of the Ottoman Empire.
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Marika Keblusek (University of Leiden)
Marika Keblusek teaches at the Art History Department at Leiden University. She directed the research project ‘Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe’, the published results of which are forthcoming. Recent publications include Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (ed., 2006) and ‘Commerce and Cultural Transfer: Merchants as Agents in the Early Modern World of Books’, in M. North (ed.), Kultureller Austausch. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung (Cologne, 2009). Her research focuses on the history of collecting; early modern agency and informal diplomacy; and the experience of exile.
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Vera Keller (University of Southern California)
Vera Keller defended her dissertation on the inventor, submariner, alchemist and philosopher Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633) at Princeton in 2008. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California and the Huntington Library, she is working on a book tentatively entitled Inventing Progress: Reason of State and the History of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe about the ways in which the political methods and apparatus of information administration developed by Tacitist historians were applied to the universal advancement of knowledge. She is particularly interested in the simultaneous development of such future-oriented genres as research agendas and wish-lists for inventions by Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz and their fraught reception in Central Europe and England. In 2011 she will be joining the faculty of the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon as a historian of science.
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Farkas Gábor Kiss (Eötvös Loránd University)
Farkas Gábor Kiss has studied Hungarian and Latin philology at the ELTE University of Budapest (MA, 1998), Medieval Studies at the Central European University (MA, 1999; Mphil, 2007), and received his PhD in Literary Studies from ELTE University of Budapest in 2006. He has been teaching various classes on the history of medieval and Renaissance Hungarian literature, and on the history of literary theory at the University of Budapest, where he has been an adjunct professor from 2007. His studies deal with the history of ideas and the reception of Renaissance literature in Central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They include Constructing the Image of a Humanist Scholar: Latin Dedications in Hungary and the use of Adages (1460-1525); Humanist Ethics and Urban Patriotism in Upper Hungary at the Turn of the Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries (Valentine Eck’s De reipublicae administratione). Recently, he has written on the presence of the art of memory in late medieval Hungary, on the history of alchemy in Hungary, and on the interaction of Central European intellectual circles with the university of Paris around 1500.
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Antonín Kostlán (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Antonín Kostlán is a Research Fellow and a Head of the Centre for the History of Sciences and Humanities of the Institute for Contemporary History of the ASCR; he is also an external lecturer at the Institute of Bohemian History at Charles University Prague. His research interests focus on the social and economic history of the early modern age; the history of mentalities and intellectual life of the early modern age, the history of science and scholarly institutions (sixteenth to twentieth centuries), and the history of historiography (sixteenth to twentieth centuries). He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Práce z dějin vědy – Studies in the History of Sciences and Humanities.
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Jacek Kowzan (University of Podlasie, Siedlce)
Jacek Kowzan graduated in Polish Language and Literature at the University of Wroclaw. He also studied at the University of Glasgow. Recently he has been working as a tutor at the University of Podlasie in Siedlce. His main research interests range from late medieval and early modern eschatology to natural history.
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Karen Kupperman (New York University)
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, who holds a PhD from Cambridge University, is Silver Professor of History at New York University. Her scholarship focuses on the Atlantic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly contacts and ventures between Europe and America and the ways that participants interpreted each other. The Jamestown Project was published by Harvard University Press early in 2007; the second edition of her book Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony also came out in 2007. Her book, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000), won the American Historical Association’s Prize in Atlantic History, and Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993) won the AHA’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for the year’s best book in American History. She has edited Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings (1988) and America in European Consciousness (1995). Among her current projects is a book on Atlantic history in the early modern period for the New Oxford World History series and an edition of Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657, 1673). She is also studying music as a mode of communication in the early modern period.
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Pierre Olivier Léchot (University of Neuchâtel)
Dr Pierre-Olivier Léchot is Scientific Collaborator at the Theological Faculty of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He completed his PhD at the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation of Geneva (2009). His main interests lie in early modern intellectual history (especially the theological and philosophical history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). He is the author of the monograph Un christianisme “sans partialité”. Irénisme et méthode chez John Dury (v.1600-1680), Paris, Honoré Champion, 2010 (forthcoming), and is also President of the Swiss Association for the History of the Huguenot Refuge.
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Howard Louthan (University of Florida)
Howard Louthan is professor of history at the University of Florida where he has taught since 2002. He works on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern central Europe with a special focus on religion. He has examined irenicism in late-sixteenth century Vienna (The Quest for Compromise), the religious thought of John Comenius (The Labyrinth of the World), and most recently the Counter-Reformation in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century Bohemia (Converting Bohemia). He is currently at work on a number of projects that range geographically from Cracow to Heidelberg.
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Jean-Paul De Lucca (University of Malta)
Jean-Paul De Lucca teaches philosophy at the University of Malta (Junior College) and is currently completing a PhD on Tommaso Campanella’s legal and political philosophy. He received an Italian Government Scholarship for doctoral research at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre in 2007/8 and was a Frances A. Yates Fellow in Intellectual and Cultural History at the Warburg Institute, University of London in 2008/9. Although his research and publications focus mainly on Campanella, his wider research interests include Renaissance and Early Modern jurisprudence, the history of political thought, philosophy of history, and early modern ideas on interreligious and intercultural relations and communication.
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Sarah Mortimer (University of Oxford)
Sarah Mortimer is a Lecturer in early modern history at Oxford, and Student (tutorial fellow) at Christ Church. She is particularly interested in the development and impact of heterodox religious and political ideas in the Protestant world. Her recent monograph, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (CUP, 2010), discusses the ideas and influence of Socinianism, especially in England. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays entitled The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600-1750.
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Tomáš Nejeschleba (Palacký University)
Tomáš Nejeschleba is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Philosophical Faculty, Palacký University Olomouc, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Sts. Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology, Palacký University Olomouc (he works as a secretary of the Centre as well). His research interests lie between medieval philosophy (Bonaventura, De reductione artium ad theologiam, Unus est magister vester, Christus, Praha 2003, translation, commentary, introductory study) and Renaissance philosophy (G. Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate hominis, Praha 2005, introductory study; Giordano Bruno, Dialogs, Praha 2008, commentary, revision of the translation). He published a monograph Johannes Jessenius in the Context of Renaissance Philosophy (in Czech, Praha 2008).
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Danny Noorlander (Georgetown University)
Danny L. Noorlander is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in Washington DC. His dissertation, entitled ‘Serving God and Mammon: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic, 1621-1674’, explores the role of religion in early Dutch expansion. Supported by the Fulbright Program and the Netherland-America Foundation, he spent 2008-09 conducting research in the Netherlands. He has also received research grants and fellowships from his own department and from the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University. He will deliver a paper about the West India Company at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston in 2011. His MA thesis at the University of Utah (2005) won a ‘best-of-year’ award from the history department. He has two translations (Dutch to English) in Major Problems in Atlantic History (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
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Leigh Penman (University of Oxford)
Leigh Penman graduated with degrees in arts and law from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral thesis, concerning millenarian thought in early seventeenth-century Germany, was undertaken at Melbourne in association with the former Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Unanticipated Millenniums: The Lutheran Experience of Chiliastic Thought, 1600–1630 (Springer), as well as more than a dozen articles on aspects of early modern history. His current research interests encompass imagined and virtual communities in seventeenth-century Europe, the network surrounding the Lusatian philosopher Jacob Böhme (d. 1624), and the instrumentalisation of early modern historical events in modern popular and political culture. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow with Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters, working on the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib.
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Rafał Prinke (Eugeniusz Piasecki University, Poznań)
Rafał T. Prinke holds an MA in English Studies (1977) and a PhD in History (2000), both from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Tourism at Eugeniusz Piasecki University, where he teaches informatics and does research on the theory and history of tourism and the sociology of travel. As a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences, he planned and directed a number of pioneering projects in electronic editions of historical sources, including the Dworzaczek Files comprising over a quarter of a million regesta of documents from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries on the nobility and landed gentry of Great Poland, and twenty-two volumes of genealogical monographs (two CD-ROM editions 1995 and 1998, and a Web edition 2004). Additional areas of research which he pursues largely as an independent scholar cover the history of science, intellectual history and that of esoteric currents, with a special interest in alchemy, as well as genealogy and heraldry. His publications include books, edited collections, and numerous articles in all of these fields. At present he is working on a long-planned monograph on Michael Sendivogius (1566-1636), the Polish alchemist of European fame.
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Jennifer Rampling (University of Cambridge)
Profile forthcoming.
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Alexander Schunka (Forschungszentrum Gotha, University of Erfurt)
Alexander Schunka is Junior Professor of European Cultures of Knowledge at the Gotha Centre of Research which is part of the University of Erfurt (Germany). He studied History at the University of Munich where he received his doctoral degree in 2004. Between 2004 and 2009 he taught early modern history at the University of Stuttgart. His main interests include the history of Central and Western Europe in the early modern era, particularly the history of migrations and transfers, religious contacts, correspondence networks, and travel accounts. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on Anglo-German Protestant encounters in the early eighteenth century. His publications include Soziales Wissen und doerfliche Welt (2000), Gaeste, die bleiben (2006), Migrationserfahrungen – Migrationsstrukturen (ed., with E. Olshausen, 2010), and a number of articles in German and English in journals and collective volumes.
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Lucie Storchová (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Lucie Storchová is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science and an editor of Acta Comeniana. International review of Comenius studies an early modern intellectual history. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University in Prague, where she also currently gives lectures on historical anthropology. She has published on early modern Orientalism and discourses of Othering. Within the last two years she has focused on early modern discourses of gender, two volumes of which were published within the project financed by the Czech science foundation (GAČR). Her PhD thesis on the subject of Bohemian humanist intellectual networks and self-fashioning is forthcoming in Autumn 2010.
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Márton Szentpéteri (University of Oxford/Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design)
Márton Szentpéteri is a former Junior Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and an associate professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Currently he is a Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Plumer Visiting Research Fellow at the St Anne’s College and a Senior Visiting Research Associate at the Modern European History Research Centre (MEHRC). His main interests lie in early modern intellectual and cultural history, and modern design culture. He is an author of the monograph Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Herborn Legacy in Transylvania (in Hungarian, 2008), and an editor of the Helikon: Revue de littérature générale et comparée, published in Budapest by the HAS.
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György E. Szönyi (University of Szeged/Central European University)
György E. Szönyi is professor of English (Szeged) and intellectual history (the Central European University, Budapest). His interests include cultural theory, the Renaissance, the Western Esoteric traditions, and conventions of symbolization – early modern and (post)modern. Recent monographs: Pictura and Scriptura: Twentieth-Century Theories of Cultural Representations (in Hungarian, Szeged, 2004); Gli angeli di John Dee (Roma: Tre Editori, 2004); John Dee’s Occultism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, paperback 2010). In the making: The Enoch Readers: A Cultural History of Angels, Magic, and Ascension on High. He has edited among others: European Iconography East and West (Leiden, 1996); The Iconography of Power (with Rowland Wymer, Szeged, 2000); ‘The Voices of the English Renaissance’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 11:1 (2005); The Iconology of Gender (with Attila Kiss, Szeged, 2008). During 2009 he served as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Communication, Media and Film of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (12 months).
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Urszula Szulakowska (University of Leeds)
Dr Urszula Szulakowska was born in England of Polish refugee parentage and took her first degree at Somerville College, Oxford, in Modern History (MA, 1974). She gained her doctorate from the University of Sydney (1988). She lectured in the history of art and architecture at Sydney University (1976-82) and at Queensland University (1982-90). She taught at Bretton Hall College (1990-2000) and is currently lecturing in art-history at Leeds University.
Dr Szulakowska has published four monographs, three of these on alchemy (Alchemy of Light; The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom; Alchemy and Contemporary Art) and an edition of essays, papers on the history of alchemy, texts for exhibition catalogues, essays on contemporary art theory and critical art reviews, as well as establishing art magazines. Her main area of research concerns Renaissance and Early Modern alchemical illustration in its religious and political context, as well as the influence of the esoteric tradition on modern art. She is currently writing a monograph on the art history of the Polish Borderlands, 1500-1650.
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Anton Tantner (University of Vienna)
Anton Tantner is lecturer at the Department of History at Universität Wien. His research interests include the history of intelligence/registry offices in Europe, house numbering, and new media in historical sciences. In 2004 he defended a dissertation about the history of the census and house numbering in the Habsburg monarchy that was published in 2007 as Ordnung der Häuser, Beschreibung der Seelen. Hausnummerierung und Seelenkonskription in der Habsburgermonarchie (=Wiener Schriften zur Geschichte der Neuzeit; 4). Innsbruck/Wien/Bozen: Studienverlag, 2007. For a detailed list of his publications and former research topics (which include jazz youth subcultures and the history of Viennese parks) see his homepage, which also provides a ‘Gallery of House Numbers’.
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Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Anita Traninger is Assistant Professor at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of research include the history of rhetoric and dialectics, literature and discourses of knowledge in early modern Europe, cultures of violence, the fact/fiction divide, and theories of the performative. She received her doctorate in 1998 from the University of Vienna for a study on the debate about universal methods of gaining and feigning knowledge between 1500 and 1720 (Mühelose Wissenschaft. Rhetorik und Lullismus in den deutschsprachigen Ländern der Frühen Neuzeit, Munich 2001). She has recently completed a book-length study on practices of conflict and genres of debate shared by and jointly shaped by scholasticism and humanism and is currently preparing, together with Kathryn Murphy (Oxford), an edited volume on the emergence of the notion of impartiality.
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Vladimír Urbánek (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Vladimír Urbánek, co-organiser of the conference, is a Research Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and a founding collaborator of Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters. His research interests focus on early modern intellectual history, scholarly communication and networks, Protestant intellectuals exiled from the Czech lands, and the life and work of Jan Amos Comenius. He is currently working on Czech millenarian prophecies from the mid-seventeenth century. He is an author of a monograph Eschatology, Knowledge and Politics: On the Intellectual History of the Post-White-Mountain Bohemian Exiles (in Czech, 2008). He is an editor-in-chief of the Acta Comeniana: International Review of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History, published in Prague.
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Hanna Orsolya Vincze (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
Hanna Orsolya Vincze completed her PhD at Central European University, Budapest (2008), with a dissertation on The Politics of Translation and Transmission: the Beginnings of Political Theorising in the Hungarian Vernacular. Her research interests are centred around intercultural exchanges and the history of political thought. She has co-edited the issue on Cultures of Communication of the European Review of History-Revue Européenne d’Histoire (vol.16), and has published on translation history, and the intellectual history of patriotism and absolutism. In 2005-2006 she was the recipient of a Chevening Scholarship in modern history at Oriel College, University of Oxford, and is currently a junior professor at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, in the Faculty of Political, Administration and Communication Sciences.
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Noémi Viskolcz (University of Szeged)
Dr Noémi Viskolcz is a College Professor in the Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Szeged, Hungary. Her main interests lie in early modern intellectual and cultural history. She is the author of two monographs: The Library of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld (1605-1655): Budapest, 2003; and Plans to Renew the Evangelical Church in Germany in the Seventeenth Century: Budapest, 2006.
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Piotr Wilczek (University of Warsaw)
Piotr Wilczek (b. 1962) is Professor and Chair of the Committee on the Study of the Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies ‘Artes Liberales’, University of Warsaw, Poland. From 1998-2001 he was a visiting professor at Rice University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also been a research scholar at Boston College, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, the University of London, and the University of East Anglia. He has held numerous fellowships and grants, including a British Academy Research Fellowship at the Warburg Institute. His book publications include: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), a critical, annotated edition of Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski (Oxford, 2001) and textbooks on Polish Renaissance Literature (2005) and Rhetoric (2008). He has recently published – as the principal editor and co-author – a book entitled The Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe: Research Proposals (Warsaw, 2010).
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Walter Woodward (University of Connecticut)
Walter W. Woodward is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and the state historian of Connecticut. His long-standing interest in the influence of the Hartlib circle and Comenian ideals on the colonial settlement of New England is reflected in his recently published Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606-1676 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
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John Young (University of Sussex)
John Young was a member of the Hartlib Papers Project and transcribed the bulk of the German material in the collection, while also writing a PhD thesis on the Dutch/German preacher and alchemist Johann Moriaen whose letters to Hartlib constitute a significant proportion of that material (Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998). He has been a transcriber on the John Foxe Project at Sheffield University and from 2000-2010 transcription and tagging manager on the Newton Project. He is now a research associate with the Casebooks Project, transcribing and studying the medico-astrological casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier.
