Visiting the ARTECHNE project team: Three Descartes Senior Research Fellows

Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University), Vasileios Syros (Academy of Finland) and Anita Guerrini (Oregon State University) will soon be visiting the ARTECHNE project team. All guest researchers have been granted a Descartes Senior Research Fellowship for three months. The Descartes Centre offers fellowships to promote intellectual exchange and collaboration in the history and/or the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities. More information: https://www.uu.nl/en/descartes-centre/about-us/fellowships

Surekha Davies is a cultural historian and historian of science. Her interests include exploration, observational sciences, monstrosity and the history of mentalities c.1400–1800. Formerly a British Library Curator and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, she is a founding editor of the book series Maps, Spaces, Cultures (Brill). She has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress and the Newberry Library. Her research has also been funded by the American Historical Association and the American Philosophical Society.

Vasileios Syros’s research interests focus on the interaction among the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions of political thought as well as on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period. He is also engaged in the comparative study of European and Islamic empires, ideas on imperial ascendancy and decline, and pre-modern approaches to the comparative study of diverse forms of political organization and types of government.

Anita Guerrini is a historian of the life sciences and  medicine. Her research interests range widely in time, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, but tend to coalesce around anatomy, natural history, the history of animals, the environment, and the history of food, and around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe.