Antonia-Oana Avram

Country: 
Romania
Year of Enrollment: 
2020

After finishing a BA in History at the University of Bucharest, Romania, I completed an MA in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies at the Medieval Studies Department at Central European University in Budapest. There, I looked at how sixteenth-century humanists' editorial practices and intellectual endeavors were main factors in constructing in their printed works an ambivalent image of the Ottomans and how this depiction of otherness was a means of humanist self-fashioning.
Currently, my doctoral research focuses on how sixteenth-century humanists, particularly those who have been labeled by modern scholars as “second-rate” thinkers, have put to good use their editorial skills, and presented through their works their own understanding of civility, humanity, and foreign societies. The aim of my research is to reconsider the parameters within which the sixteenth-century European discourse about humanity and natural rights accommodated extra-European societies, or to be more precise, societies that Europeans themselves considered to be different from their own, in this case the Ottoman Empire.
I am broadly interested in history of book production, practices of authorship and translation in early modernity, as well as history of ideas and politico-philosophical thought. In addition, I am interested in historical anthropology and ethnography, particularly in the written and visual representations of humanity in printed, cartographic, and engraved works.

Qualification

MA in Comparative History: Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies, Central European University, Budapest (2020)
BA in History, University of Bucharest (2018)

Thesis