Together with her research group, Sietske Fransen investigates how knowledge was visualised by both scientists and artists in early modern Europe (c. 1500–1800). And more than that: how the process of image-making itself led to new insights. How did an image come into being that we now categorise as scientific? Who was involved and how were they created? Sietske combines methods from the history of art and science, intellectual history and cultural history. This research brings the knowledge practices of the early modern period into focus — whilst also holding up a mirror to our contemporary visual culture.
About Sietske Fransen
Fransen began her academic career at Utrecht University, where she obtained a propaedeutic degree in Biology, a Bachelor’s degree in Language and Culture Studies with a minor in Medieval Studies in 2007. She subsequently obtained a Master’s degree in Cultural and Intellectual History of the Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, University of London, in 2008. In 2010, she began her PhD research there, investigating how doctors in the seventeenth century used language to reach different audiences with slightly different information. She obtained her PhD with her thesis, “Exchange of Knowledge through Translation: Jan Baptista van Helmont and his Editors and Translators in the Seventeenth Century”, in which she demonstrated that translators often exerted a significant influence: they imposed their own emphases through word choices, omissions or insertions of text, and thus frequently produced a partially new book in the author’s name.
Following her PhD, Fransen began her research into visual communication strategies in the seventeenth century as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Lorraine Daston’s department at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Between 2015 and 2019, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the interdisciplinary project “Making Visible: the visual and graphic practices at the Royal Society, 1660–1710” at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019, she has led her own research group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute in Rome. Since 2021, she has also been a co-investigator on the NWO Open Competition project “Visualizing the Unknown: Scientific Observation, Representation and Communication in 17th-century Science and Society”, which explores early modern visual and material culture of microscopy and the fluid boundaries between science and art during this period.
Photo by Enrico Fontolan.