Prof. Dr. Sietske Fransen

Sietske Fransen is Max Planck Research Group Leader of the group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, and since February 2026 also professor by special appointment of Early Modern European Intellectual History, endowed by the Louise Thijssen-Schoute Stichting, at the Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).

First as co-initiator and since October 2021 as co-investigator (and currently interim PI) Fransen is part of the project “Visualizing the Unknown: Scientific Observation, Representation, and Communication in 17th-century Science and Society”, which is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO, grant nr. 406.20.FR.012). In this project the interdisciplinary team explores early modern visual and material culture of microscopy and the fluid boundaries between science and art during this period.

After studying biology and medieval studies at Utrecht University, Fransen received her MA and PhD degrees from the Warburg Institute in London with a PhD thesis titled Exchange of Knowledge Through Translation: Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Editors and Translators in the Seventeenth Century (2014). She was a postdoc researcher, first at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2014–2015) and then at the University of Cambridge (2015–2019) for the project Making Visible: the visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society. She has held residential fellowships at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Descartes Center in Utrecht, the Research Institute of Erfurt University in Gotha, and the Huygens Institute (KNAW), in Amsterdam.

Fransen has published widely on language and translation in seventeenth-century Europe as well as on the role of images in knowledge production. She has also worked extensively on the Dutch seventeenth-century microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and his use of visual communication as part of his scientific practice, and more broadly on the history of microscopic observation as a case study in the history of scientific practice. Through her work on the use of diagrams in science she was involved as scientific advisor on the Fondazione Prada exhibition ‘Diagrams: a project by AMO/OMA’ (Venice, 2025). 

She is currently studying the role of image making, and specifically the act of drawing, as an active part of scientific practice from the late middle ages to the present. On top visual and textual analysis, she also employs the methodology of historical re-enactment to better understand practices of observation and drawing. She is especially focusing on the various collaborations that are at the basis of these practices: artists with scientific practitioners, assistants in the workshop/place, women and other family members as contributors. The interest in the history of collaboration has been inspired by the collaborative work in the various projects she has worked in and is currently leading.