Contributing Editors

Eleonora Andriani (Astronomy, Astrology, Magic and Divination in the MIddle Ages; current term 2023-2024)

Eleonora Andriani is an international Doctor in medieval philosophy (Università del Salento – Universität zu Köln) and a member of ‘CETEFIL: Centro per l’edizione di testi filosofici medievali e rinascimentali’. She was Occasional Student at the Warburg Institute of the University of London (2016 – 2018) and research assistant at the Thomas-Institut der Universität zu Köln (2015 – 2016) in the project Maimonides Latinus. In Cologne she received an academic training by ‘a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne’ having the opportunity to develop a doctoral dissertation project (2015 – 2016). From September 2020 to November 2022 she was post-doctoral researcher at the Paris Observatory, where she worked on the history of Alfonsine astronomy in Europe as a team member of the project ALFA (an ERC funded project; principal Investigator: Dr Matthieu Husson). Since  December 01/2022, she is at the IRHT (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes) in Paris as a team member of the SourcEncyMe (Sources des encyclopédies médiévales) project directed by Isabelle Draelants. Morevover, she is currently working on the publication of the critical edition of the Prohemium of the Liber introductorius of Michael Scot, in which her doctoral thesis mainly consists. Her areas of research interests are: History of Medieval Astronomy, Astrology, Magic and Divination.

Anthony Greco (The Middle East and North Africa; current term 2023-24)

Anthony Greco is a PhD candidate specializing in modern Middle East history. His dissertation “Flows of History: Science, Colonialism, and the Cairo Nilometer, 1700-1920” traces the history of the Nile flood and the hydraulic knowledge production and engineering which made it increasingly legible, governable, and profitable from the early-eighteenth to twentieth century. It complicates how we understand the relationship between science and empire by exploring the complex rather than unidirectional relationship between European and Arabic, Ottoman, and Sudanese discourses and practices of Nile management. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Consortium for the History of Science, and the Regents of the University of California Santa Barbara.

Thomas Horst (Cosmography: Maps, Atlases, Globes, Instruments and Texts; since 2018, current term 2023-2024)

Thomas Horst studied History and Anthropology at the Universities of Munich and Vienna (PhD, 2008). He won the prestigious Fiorini-Haardt-Prize of the International Coronelli-Society for the Study of Globes in 2010. His book about Gerhard Mercator as a cartographer (2011), translated into French and Dutch, has been distinguished by the Société de Geographie with a special award in Paris in 2012. In 2017 and 2018, he was Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG in Berlin. His main areas of interest include the history of early modern cosmography, climate history, the history of discoveries, German-Portuguese relations, transfer of cartographic knowledge as well as cultural history, anthropology and historical visual culture. He is currently working as a map librarian at the Bavarian State Library in Munich and also Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Geodesy of the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He is Editor of the Review Section for Imago Mundi, the International Journal for the History of Cartography, Extended Board Member of the International Coronelli-Society for the Study of Globes” (Vienna), and Co-Initiator of PORT-AL-HIST, the International Academical Network for the Research about German-Portuguese History.

Judy Kaplan (Newsletter Editor; current term 2023-24)

Judy Kaplan is a cultural and intellectual historian of the human sciences with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistic research. She is currently working on a project about the history of language universals. Her work has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She joined the Science History Institute in September 2023, where she is focused on open educational resources in the genre of scientific biography.

Zeynep Kuleli Karasahan (Turkish Language Sources; current term 2023-24)

Angélique Lemarchand (classics, ancient sciences ; Greek and Latin
Antiquity; current term 2024-2025)

Angélique Lemarchand is a PhD candidate in classics specializing in the ancient sciences, with a focus on the history of concepts and conceptual distortion. She studies the idea of water flux, the “liquid element,” and liquid bodies at large, as well as the boundaries between them in the Greek and Latin traditions. Her work explores streams of transmission and their style by analyzing epistemic and scientific texts across time. Her research is supported by Nantes University (France), and she has a fellowship from Stanford University. As a contributing editor for IsisCB, she is collecting the most recent scholarly research in the history of the ancient sciences.

Francesco Luzzini (Italian Language Sources; since 2017, current term 2024-2025)

Francesco Luzzini (PhD, History of Science; BS/MS, Natural Sciences) is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Dept. of Philosophy) and Johns Hopkins University (Dept. of History of Science). His work focuses on the Earth and environmental sciences, natural philosophy, and medicine in early modern Europe, with important forays into modern and contemporary contexts. His current project SOUNDEPTH aims to understand how the debate on mineral generation in early modern Europe influenced the development of natural philosophy, the Earth sciences, and the role of humans as geological and environmental agents.

Francesco is also Affiliate Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Dept. I). He is member of the Nominating Committee of the History of Earth Sciences Society (HESS) and Co-editor (History of Science) of the journal Il Protagora. Among his previous positions, he was Mellon Fellow (2020) and Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016) at the University of Oklahoma, Visiting Fellow (2016) at MPIWG Berlin, and Research Fellow (2012, 2014) at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. He taught history of biology, history of geology, and history of medicine at the Universities of Milan and East Piedmont.

Sophie Serra (French Language Sources; current term 2023-24)

Sophie Serra is currently a postdoc in the project «Reassessing Aristotelian Science » at the University of Gothenburg working with the P.I. Ana Maria Mora Marquez. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Project ALFA, lead by Matthieu Husson and hosted by the CNRS at the Paris Observatory-PSL where she worked on the late 13^th century and first generation 14^th century Parisian astronomers. She received her PhD in History of Philosophy from Paris Sorbonne Université in 2015 with a dissertation on an joint interpretation of Nicole Oresme’s intellectual and political projects throughout his career. And she also is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) where she graduated in 2010. She has held research and teaching positions in Medieval Philosophy and History of Science in several European institutions, cultivating her interest for both of these fields. Her research focuses on 13^th and 14^th century Latin and French Medieval Natural Philosophy, with a special interest for its meeting points with the Quadrivium, and the circulation of scientific knowledge during the Middle Ages. She is currently developing her research along an axis that deals with the notions of errors and corrections in Medieval sciences. She also is an associate researcher at SPHere (UMR 7219), a member of the European Society for the History of Science (EHSH), the Société Internationale pour l’Etude de la Philosophie Médiévale (SIEPM). She manages the website Pariscope Médiéval devoted to news announcements and Paris academic life in the Medieval Philosophy field, and she is special editor for French language source for the Isis CB.

Chaokang Tai (Dutch Language Sources; term 2022-2024)

Chaokang Tai is a historian of modern astronomy and photography currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg in the DFG-funded project “Astronomy’s Glass Archive: Photographic Practices at the Observatory, 1850-1950”, headed by Omar Nasim. His research focuses on the material practices of astrophotography in Dutch astronomy during the first half of the twentieth century and the global networks created by the Dutch observatories to obtain photographic plates. During his PhD (University of Amsterdam, 2021), Chaokang explored the transformation of early-twentieth-century astronomy and its relations to political developments through the work of Dutch astronomer and Marxist Anton Pannekoek. He is a guest researcher at Leiden Observatory and an external member of the Vossisus Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences (University of Amsterdam) and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (Utrecht University). 

Luís Tirapicos (Portuguese Language Sources and Archaeoastronomy; since 2018, current term: 2023-2024)

Luís Tirapicos studied astronomy at the University of Porto and History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon (MA, 2010; PhD, 2017). He is a researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His main research interests are the history of astronomy in Portugal, Jesuit science, Iberian archaeoastronomy, and the material culture of science. In early 2010 he was a research intern in the History of Science and Technology at the Royal Observatory–National Maritime Museum (Greenwich); and in the fall of 2013, a Resident Fellow of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City (MO). Between 2010 and 2012 he held a BGCT fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon, which has since become part of the National Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC/Museums of the University of Lisbon). As one of the authors of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, 2014), edited by Thomas Hockey, he was a recipient of the 2017 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy, awarded by the American Astronomical Society.