Main Focus
- Landscape History/ History of Knowledge
- Conceptual History & Visual Culture
- History of Science/ Environmental History
- Sensory History/ History of Knowledge
- Mediterranean Intellectual History/ Transcultural History
Research Project
ThingScapes: Landscape Change and the Making of Historical Evidence in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany
Curriculum Vitae
Luc Wodzicki is a historian of the early modern Mediterranean, specialising in transcultural political communication and the epistemic interplay of landscapes, things, and visual culture. He received his PhD from the Graduate School “Global Intellectual History” (Freie Universität Berlin / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) in 2021 with the dissertation The Virtuous. Political Communication Between the Italian States and the Ottoman Court in the Age of Mehmet II (1453–1481), which identifies virtue ethics as a transcultural touchstone in the early modern Mediterranean. Before joining the Department Michalsky at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome as a postdoctoral fellow, Wodzicki was a postdoc in Early Modern History (chair of Prof. Daniela Hacke) at Freie Universität Berlin, where he taught at BA and MA level. He has held fellowships at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2016–2017), and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (2019–2020, 2024). At the Hertziana, his project ThingScapes investigates how engineered environments recalibrate historical evidence, focusing on the eighteenth-century drainage of the Val di Chiana and the antiquarian practices of the Accademia Etrusca in Cortona. With Sébastien Tremblay (Europa-Universität Flensburg), he co-leads the interdisciplinary Working Group on Historical Landscape Research; together with Prof. Daniela Hacke, he co-founded “Dingwissen” (“Thing Knowledge”), an initiative linking the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) and Berlin research institutions to explore things, the senses, and knowledge production. His broader interests include conceptual history, early modern Italian–Ottoman relations, and the politics of collections, landscapes, and territory.
Memberships
- Co-Lead: Working Group Historical Landscape Research
- Co-Lead: DHCN: Thing Knowledge. Sensory Histories in Transcultural Spaces from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
- Chair: Network of Competence Islam and Society