Iordan Avramov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Iordan Avramov is a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He has worked on the early Royal Society, especially on Henry Oldenburg, but also on Boyle; he is also interested in the history of the first learned journals. He has published a range of articles on Oldenburg and recently completed (with Michael Hunter and Hideyuki Yoshimoto) a reconstruction of Boyle’s lost library: Boyle’s Books: The Evidence of his Citations (London, 2010). Apart from his continuing interest in Oldenburg, his newest projects focus on the book culture at the early Royal Society and on early modern scientific letter seals.

Ingrid De Smet (University of Warwick)

Ingrid De Smet is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick, specializing in the intellectual culture of Early Modern France and the Low Countries, especially through the lens of neo-Latin literature. Ingrid has published articles and chapters on the Classical tradition, early modern polemics, and various writers including Agrippa d’Aubigné, Montaigne, and Nicolas Rigault. She is the author of Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581-1655 (1996) and of Thuanus: The Making of Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) (2006). Most recently, she has prepared a critical edition of de Thou’s neo-Latin didactic poem on falconry, the Hieracosophion (1582/84), with French translation and commentary, and a substantive introductory study of the socio-cultural significance of hawking in sixteenth-century France; this book is forthcoming in the Bibliotheca cynegetica series, newly continued by Droz (2013). Ingrid was Director of Warwick’s interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of the Renaissance from 2007 to 2010, and is principal investigator of the Mellon-funded Renaissance and Early Modern Communities project, in collaboration with the Newberry Library (Chicago) (2009-2012). In October 2011 Ingrid started a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on ‘Secrets and their Keepers in late Renaissance France’.

Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology)

Mordechai Feingold is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His publications include The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560-1640 (1984); The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (2004); and (with Jed Buchwald) Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2012). He is currently working on the history of the Royal Society.

Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University)

Anthony Grafton teaches European intellectual history and history of science at Princeton University. He has published book-length studies of the late Renaissance polymaths Joseph Scaliger (Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 1983-1993) and Isaac Casaubon (with Joanna Weinberg; “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Episode in Renaissance Scholarship (2011), as well as intellectual biographies of Leon Battista Alberti and Girolamo Cardano and studies of footnotes and forgeries. His current projects include a study of the scholarly work of Johann Buxtorf I (with Joanna Weinberg) and an analysis of early modern efforts to reconstruct the Passover Seder that, they believed, formed an essential part of the Last Supper. This summer he and Glenn-Most served as co-directors of a collaborative, comparative analysis of learned practices applied to canonical texts, which was based at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin.

Nick Hardy (University of Oxford)

Nick Hardy is a third-year DPhil candidate at University College, Oxford, and is about to begin a ‘Title A’ Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is interested in the history of scholarship and literary criticism in the long seventeenth century. He is currently working on the correspondence of Isaac Casaubon and Paolo Sarpi; a study of the scholarly career of John Bois, one of the translators of the King James Bible; and, in the longer term, a monograph based on his doctoral dissertation, ‘The ars critica in early modern England’.

Howard Hotson (University of Oxford)

Howard Hotson, Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History, is Project Director of 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 geographical contexts. He is currently completing a study of the international diaspora of Reformed intelligentsia during the Thirty Years War and editing the series on ‘Further Reformation and Universal Reform’ emerging from the Project’s 2010 conference.

Florence C. Hsia (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Florence C. Hsia is associate professor of history of science and Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research and teaching interests include genres of scientific writing, science and print culture, scientific travel, natural knowledge-making in cross-cultural contexts, the historical intersections of science and religion, and the history of archival practices. She is the author of Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Rhodri Lewis (University of Oxford)

Rhodri Lewis, co-organiser of the conference (with Noel Malcolm), has interests in literary and intellectual history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In addition to numerous shorter studies, he is the author of Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (2007) and William Petty on the Order of Nature (2012). At the moment, he is at work on four projects. First, a monograph on Shakespeare’s relationship to early modern theories of apprehension, perception, and imagination, provisionally titled Shaping Fantasies. Second, editing (with Daniel Andersson and Sophie Weeks) volume 5 of the Oxford University Press edition of Francis Bacon’s complete works, which comprises the De sapientia veterum (1609) and Bacon’s early philosophical writings to about 1611. Third, editing (with Kate Bennett and William Poole) the correspondence of John Aubrey as one of the Cultures of Knowledge core projects. Fourth, a monograph on the changing significance of the ‘man of letters’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jan Loop (University of Kent/Warburg Institute)

Jan Loop is a lecturer of Early Modern History at the University of Kent and the academic coordinator of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe (CHASE) at the Warburg Institute, London. His research interests are in intellectual, religious and cultural history in Europe and the Near East, with a special focus on the Western knowledge of the Arab, Ottoman and Persian world from 1500-1800. He has published (inter alia) on eighteenth-century German oriental scholars (Johann Jacob Reiske, Albert Schultens, Johann David Michaelis) and on early modern translations of the Qur’an. Together with Alastair Hamilton he has recently organised a conference on Translating the Qur’an and a seminar series on Islam and the Enlightenment at the Warburg Institute. He is currently preparing a monograph on Johann Heinrich Hottinger and Arabic Studies in the Seventeenth Century.

Richard Maber (Durham University)

Richard Maber, Emeritus Professor of French, Durham University, has published extensively on seventeenth-century French literature, especially poetry, and intellectual history. He is the founder (1985) and General Editor of the interdisciplinary journal The Seventeenth Century. He is Chairman of the interdisciplinary Durham University Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies (Director, 1989-2009), and Secretary of the Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies, and has directed sixteen major international conferences. He has published Publishing in the Republic of Letters: the Ménage-Grævius-Wetstein Correspondence, 1679-1692 (2005), and is currently engaged on establishing a complete répertoire analytique of the extensive international correspondence of the scholar, poet, and man of letters Gilles Ménage (1613-1692), for which he has been supported by a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellowship. As well as publishing editions of French poetry (Classiques Garnier), he is also currently editing the letters from Germany of Émery Bigot (1657-1658), and the correspondence between Ménage and the lawyer Louis Nublé.

Noel Malcolm (University of Oxford)

Noel Malcolm, co-organiser of the conference (with Rhodri Lewis), has wide interests in early modern intellectual history. He has edited the complete correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994), and is preparing the English and Latin texts of Leviathan for the Clarendon Edition of Hobbes’s works (of which he is a general editor). He has also published (with Jacqueline Stedall) John Pell (1611–1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005), as well as studies of figures such as Bodin, Mersenne, Comenius, Kircher, and Oldenburg. He is a Fellow of All Souls College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He chairs the Steering Committee of Cultures of Knowledge.

Antony McKenna (Université Jean Monnet St Etienne)

Antony McKenna, former pupil of Christ’s Hospital (Horsham, Sussex), and of Brasenose College, Oxford, Professor in French Literature at the University of Saint-Etienne, is the assistant director of the research-team UMR CNRS 5037: ‘Institut d’Histoire de la Pensée classique’ (Saint-Etienne – Lyon – Clermont-Ferrand). He is the author of a thesis entitled ‘De Pascal à Voltaire. Le rôle des Pensées de Pascal dans l’histoire des idées entre 1670 et 1734’, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 276-277, Oxford, 1990; he is co-author of the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2004); he directs the critical edition of the correspondence of Pierre Bayle (Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, 1999-, 9 volumes published); a periodical devoted to clandestine philosophical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, La Lettre clandestine (Paris, PUPS); and a number of collections with the Parisian publisher Honoré Champion : Les Dix-huitièmes siècles, La Vie des Huguenots and Libre pensée et littérature clandestine.

Anthony Milton (University of Sheffield)

Anthony Milton is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sheffield. His books include Catholic and Reformed. The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600-1640, The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, and Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn. He is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘England’s Second Reformation: the battle for the Church of England 1636-66’, for which he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He is also a member of the international editorial board of the new multi-volume edition of the Acts of the Synod of Dort, scheduled for publication in 2018.

Leigh Penman (Goldsmiths, University of London)

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. An alumnus of the Cultures of Knowledge Project (where he worked on the epistolary community surrounding Samuel Hartlib), 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.

William Poole (University of Oxford)

William Poole has edited Francis Lodwick’s A Description of a Country Not Named (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006), and has published a monograph on Milton and the Idea of the Fall (CUP, 2005). He works on seventeenth-century textual scholarship and intellectual history, and co-directed the AHRC-funded project Free-Thinking and Language-Planning in Late Seventeenth-Century England. He has published two-dozen articles on aspects of literary, scientific, and intellectual history, and has edited various linguistic, theological, and bibliographical manuscripts from the period. He is editing (with Kate Bennett and Rhodri Lewis) the correspondence of John Aubrey as one of the Cultures of Knowledge core projects.

Paul R. Quarrie (Maggs Bros Ltd)

P. R. Quarrie has been working in the field of rare books for more than forty years, both in libraries (mostly at Eton College) and the lecture room, as well as (from 1995) the sale room and the antiquarian book trade. From about 1996 has worked largely on the celebrated library of the earls of Macclesfield, overseeing the dispersal of this celebrated collection, beginning with the sale to Cambridge University Library of the scientific archive (mostly letters and papers relating to Newton and his circle). He is the author of catalogues, reviews, essays on bibliographical topics, translations, and most recently in 2011 Winchester College and the King James Bible, a work commemorating Winchester’s involvement in biblical scholarship. He is a contributor to the forthcoming History of the Oxford University Press.

Sarah Rivett (Princeton University)

Sarah Rivett is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. She specializes in early American and transatlantic literature and culture. Her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011), highlights the unity of science and religion in transatlantic networks of knowledge formation by arguing that empiricism and natural philosophy transformed the scope of Puritan religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Her current book, Savage Sounds: Indigenous Words and Missionary Linguists in Early America, explores the impact of indigenous languages on European ideas about the representational power of words, from seventeenth century Jesuit and Protestant missions to the imperial wars of the eighteenth century to notions of the metaphysical and imaginative capacity of Indian words as the basis for a new national literary history in the 1820s.

Filippo de Vivo (Birkbeck, University of London)

Filippo de Vivo studies the connections between communication and politics, widely conceived, in early modern Italy, particularly in the republic of Venice. He has worked on the uses of rhetoric and the circulation of manuscripts, on news-leaking, book-printing and record-making, on the physical spaces for the exchange of information (such as pharmacies), and on the international circulation of ideas and news. He is the author of Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2007, new Italian version 2012), and the coeditor (with Brian Richardson) of a recent special issue of Italian Studies (2011) on ‘Scribal Culture in Italy, 1450-1700’. He is currently preparing for publication Thomas Hobbes’ translation of the letters of Venetian friar Fulgenzio Micanzio to William Cavendish, second earl of Devonshire. Finally, he is principal investigator in a major four-year project funded by the European Research Council on ‘The Comparative History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’.