Maria Avxentevskaya

Maria Avxentevskaya, a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, specializes in the premodern history of science and medicine and the longue durée history of scientific communication. Her work intersects humanism, semiotics, translation, rhetoric, and networking...

• Education:PhD from Freie Universität Berlin (2015, with distinction) for her dissertation How to Discover Things with Words? John Wilkins: From Inventio to Invention.

Maria explores how early modern scientific practices—such as rhetoric, persuasion, and knowledge networking—shape contemporary research ethics and communication. She co-edits volumes like Signs and Signification in a Global Comparative Perspective (Brill, 2024) and Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2022), and leads projects like The Word and the Brain and The Physician’s Album Amicorum. Her research emphasizes the interplay between language, knowledge systems, and transcultural scientific practices.

Maria has taught science communication, early modern science, and knowledge in translation at Bard College Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Sydney. Her science journalism appears in The Independent and Scientific American, highlighting historical parallels to modern ethical dilemmas in AI and digital humanities.