Dr Maria Floruțău

Dr Maria Floruțău is a Wenner Gren Postdoctoral Fellow and a visiting researcher (2025-2028) in the History and Philosophy of Science Department, working under the mentorship of Prof. Dániel Margócsy. Her project investigates the early development of institutionalised research, revealing how structures, funding, communication, and knowledge creation practices shaped modern science globally. To do so, it will examine 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 (Manilla, 1780) — founded by members of the Dutch, British East India Companies and the Spanish colonial state respectively, as well as their entanglements in Japan. By analysing how these societies functioned as active agents of knowledge production—not merely conduits for colonial extraction—the project reveals how collaboration, competition, and confrontation between European and Asian knowledge systems shaped the institutionalisation of modern science.

Maria received her DPhil in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford in eighteenth century transnational history of ideas. The project showed how philosophical knowledge circulated from Eastern to Western Europe during the Enlightenment. Using a prolific Transylvanian philosopher as a case study and common thread, she investigated the eighteenth century prize contests of academies and societies in the Netherlands and Germany to demonstrate the significant role of prize essays in philosophical production.

Prior to joining Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the ‘Instructing Natural History’ project led by Linda Andersson Burnett in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at the Uppsala University where she investigated the genre of natural history instructions through the examples of the Batavian Society Enlightenment prize contests and the instructions for natural history institution creation in the Habsburg Empire.

In 2025, Maria was Japan Society for Promotion of Science Summer Fellow at the University of Kyoto and is also affiliated with the ERC Advanced project SAIGA in the History of Art Faculty at the University of Warsaw where she is investigating the intersections between history of science and art in the way East European and Eurasian animals were perceived by eighteenth century naturalists.

Keywords: global and transnational history of long eighteenth century, Enlightenment.