Research Projects

My research is motivated by a core set of questions that examine conventional categories we use to construct our histories, categories such as Modern and Pre-Modern or East and West. The histories we tell about science in early modern Europe are not as rich as they could be because we tend to neglect cultures that do not fit easily into these chronological and geographic categories. My book manuscript, The Astrologers of Maximilian I: Nature, Knowledge and Politics in the Holy Roman Empire, explores a period typically overshadowed by the seemingly modern and scientific accomplishments of Nikolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani coporis fabrica. My book is part of a relatively recent expansion in the history of science that has recovered an intellectually vibrant fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Europe and promises to change our understanding of subsequent developments in the history of science. Two other projects extend my research into Hungary and Byzantium, challenging standard narratives that confine Hungary and Central Europe and the Byzantine Empire to some liminal space in the history of Western science and narratives about Modernity. Excluding these states because they do not fit neatly into our categories reinforces their perceived marginality and occludes their significance in the history of science. By relocating them back into the center of our understanding of early modern European culture, we begin to recover the pervasive and immensely powerful role of science it its manifold guises.