Main Focus
- Early modern history of science and medicine
- History of the book
- Visual Culture
- Media Studies
- Digital Humanities
- Research Project
Research Projects
Collaborative Vision: Depicting Microscopic Observations
Translating Medicine in the Premodern World
The Alphabet of Nature: Languages, Science, and Translation in Early Modern Europe
Publications (Selection)
- "Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, His Images and Draughtsmen", Perspectives on Science 27 (2019), n. 3, pp. 485–544,
URL: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/posc_a_00314 (accessed 04.09.2019).
- (ed. with Niall Hodson and Karl A.E. Enenkel), Translating Early Modern Science, Leiden 2017 (Intersections 51).
- "Latin in a Time of Change – The Choice of Language as a Signifier of New Science?", Isis, 108 (2017), n. 3, pp. 629–635.
- "Anglo-Dutch Translations of Medical and Scientific Texts", Literature Compass 14 (2017), n. 4.
- (with Katherine M. Reinhart), Science made Visible: Drawings, Prints, Objects (exhibition catalog London), London 2018.
Curriculum Vitae
Sietske Fransen studied biology and medieval studies at Utrecht
University, before receiving her MA and PhD degrees from the Warburg
Institute in London with a thesis entitled Exchange of Knowledge Through Translation: Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Editors and Translators in the Seventeenth Century.
She was a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of
Science in Berlin (2014–2015) and at the University of Cambridge
(2015–2019), in the project Making Visible: the visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society.
She is currently working on the role, function, and application of
visualizations in the acquisition of early modern scientific and medical
knowledge. She in especially interested in the process of abstracting
knowledge from narratives in books, and practical experiences, into
visual forms like tables, diagrams, and abstract images. Her research
concentrates on the working methods of scientific practitioners in the
16th and 17th centuries, and the ways in which they used manuscripts and
prints, languages and visualizations to communicate their ideas. Her
interest in media changes in the European medieval and early modern
period has made her increasingly curious about the impact of digital
media and digital tools on current historical research, something she
will investigate with her Research Group.
She has published on
language and translation in seventeenth-century Europe in Isis,
Literature Compass, and edited the collected volume Translating Early
Modern Science. A special issue co-edited with Katherine Reinhart on
"The Practice of Copying in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" is
about to appear in Word & Image.
Memberships/Honorary Positions
Since 2019: Assistant Editor of Centaurus, a journal
of the history of science and its cultural aspects
Since 2019: Member of the editorial board of Lias,
Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources
Since 2018: Member of the Library Committee of the
Royal Society