Prof. Dr. Vlad Alexandrescu – Principal Investigator
Intellectual historian, Professor at the French Departement of the University of Bucharest; PhD in Philosophy, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 1995); Dr. habil. (2013). Director of the Research Center “Foundations of Modern Thought” (founded in 2001). Co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Early Modern Studies (founded in 2012, indexed in ISI Web of Knowledge Emerging Sources Citation Index). Areas of specialisation: Pascal, Descartes, Cantemir, Early Modern Thought. Mellon Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London, 2005). Project director at the “New Europe College” Institute for Advanced Study (Bucharest, 2012-2016). “P.G. Castex” prize of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (Paris, 2013) and “N. Bălcescu” prize of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest, 2014).
Volumes: Le Paradoxe chez Blaise Pascal, Berne, Peter Lang, 1997; Croisées de la Modernité. Hypostases de l’esprit et de l’individu au XVIIe siècle, București, Zeta Books, 2012; [editor], Branching Off: The Early Moderns in Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, Bucarest, Zeta Books, 2009 ; [editor, with Robert Theis], Nature et Surnaturel. Philosophies de la nature et métaphysique aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlag, 2010; René Descartes, Corespondența completă, îngrijită de Vlad Alexandrescu, vol. I, 1607-1638; vol. II, 1639-1644, Iași, Polirom, 2014
Dr Georgiana D. Hedesan – Senior Researcher
I am a Senior Researcher in the Cantemir Project, as well as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Oxford. My specialisms are history of early modern alchemy and Paracelsianism, early modern intellectual history, history of science and medicine. I was the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Research Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical History and Humanities at the University of Oxford, researching the topic of universal medicine and radical prolongation of life in early modern alchemy. My first book, entitled An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) was published in 2016 by Routledge. In 2021 my co-edited book, Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present (with Tim Rudbog, University of Copenhagen) was also published by Palgrave MacMillan. I have a PhD in History from University of Exeter (UK), a Master of Arts (Western Esotericism) from University of Exeter, a Master of Science (Project Management) from University of Leeds, and two Bachelor’s degrees (History and Economics, Summa cum Laude) from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Click here for a full CV and here for my Google Scholar profile.