Ovanes Akopyan (University of Warwick): ‘Astrology, Humanism, and “Latins”: Maximus the Greek and the Reception of Renaissance Culture in Sixteenth-Century Russia‘
Ovanes Akopyan is a PhD candidate in Renaissance studies at the University of Warwick. His research interests include Renaissance philosophy, history of astrology and magic, and early modern science. Mr. Akopyan has presented research at several conferences in the field of intellectual history. He has published extensively on Renaissance culture and philosophy. He has translated several Renaissance texts into Russian including Book I of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem and some of Marsilio Ficino’s treatises. His current projects include a publication and translation (into Russian) of Marsilio Ficino’s De religione christiana, a new Russian translation of Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, and an edited volume on astrology and anti-astrology in the Renaissance (to be published with Routledge). Mr. Akopyan is the recipient of Chancellor’s International Scholarship at the University of Warwick as well as several research grants (Marjani Foundation, CNRS, Deutsches Institut Moskau, Russian Foundation for Research in the Humanities, and others).
Trude Dijkstra (University of Amsterdam): ‘Constructing Confucius in the Low Countries: How the Western Idea of Confucius came into being through Dutch Printed-Work of the Seventeenth Century’
Trude Dijkstra is PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. She is part of the interdisciplinary NWO-project ‘The Chinese Impact. Images and Ideas of China in the Dutch Golden Age’. Her research focusses on how China was presented to Europeans through printed publications, 1595-1721. Her most recent publications have focussed on how the Chinese Rites Controversy was presented in newspapers of the Dutch Republic at the end of the seventeenth century, including an article on the first European translation of the works of Confucius and its dissemination in Europe through various types of print-work. She is currently working on an article about the reviews of the first translation of Confucius found in Dutch and French learned journals of the Early Modern period, and the image these reviews present of China’s great sage.
Margherita Mantovani (Sapienza Università di Roma/Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris): ‘Apocalypticism and Angelical Imagination. The Reception of the Hebrew Book of Enoch in the Renaissance‘
Margherita Mantovani studied History of Christianity, Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Rome (Sapienza University and Pontifical Biblical Institute) and in Paris (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes). She prepares her PhD dissertation on the Christian reception of Jewish mysticism in the Renaissance, focusing on the Latin version of the 13th century Rabbi Yosef Giqatilla’s Sefer Sha‘are Orah (Book of the Gates of Light). Her main research interests include the Jewish-Christian relations from Antiquity to the Renaissance period; Old and New Testament Apocrypha; Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts; Christian Kabbalah; history of scholarship, with particular reference to the work of Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg.
warburgpostgrad 