Maria Florutau

Biography

I am currently a Wenner-Gren Postdoctoral Fellow (2025–2028) at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, working under the mentorship of Prof. Dániel Margócsy. My project investigates the early development of institutionalised research by examining three colonial learned societies in Asia - the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (Jakarta, 1778), the Asiatic Society (Kolkata, 1784), and the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country (Manila, 1780) - and their entanglements in Japan. By analysing how these societies functioned as active agents of knowledge production, the project reveals how collaboration, competition, and confrontation between European and Asian knowledge systems shaped the institutionalisation of modern science globally.

I remain an affiliated researcher at Uppsala University, where I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the 'Instructing Natural History' project led by Prof. Linda Andersson Burnett. During that fellowship, I examined the genre of natural history instructions through the Batavian Society's Enlightenment prize contests and the instructions for natural history institution creation in the Habsburg Empire. I will return to Uppsala in 2028–2030 for the final phase of my Wenner-Gren fellowship.

I study the global and transnational history of the European Enlightenment and am particularly interested in decentralising the circulation of knowledge across the continent from Eastern to Western Europe and back during the long eighteenth century, as well as understanding the contributory nature of non-European thought on enlightened philosophy and culture. More broadly, my research investigates the early development of institutionalised science, examining how structures, funding, communication, and knowledge creation practices shaped modern science globally. I am especially interested in how European and Asian knowledge systems collaborated and competed in colonial contexts, and in recovering the active role of non-European actors in knowledge production.

I received my DPhil in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford. My thesis, revised as Transnational Knowledge Transfer in the Enlightenment (c. 1750–1790): The Case of József Fogarasi Pap, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. I have also held affiliations with the University of Kyoto, where I was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Summer Fellow in 2025, and with the University of Warsaw, where I am affiliated with the ERC Advanced project SAIGA, investigating intersections between the history of science and art in the perception of East European and Eurasian animals by eighteenth-century naturalists.