Chiara Petrolini

Chiara Petrolini studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in Florence. She was a research fellow at the University of Vienna, where she worked on early orientalism in Central Europe, with a particular focus on the imperial librarian Sebastian Tengnagel. She has held fellowships from the Warburg Institute, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the École Normale Supérieure and the Balzan Foundation, among others. Her research addresses the intellectual, religious and political conflicts of early modern Europe, with a focus on Catholic orientalism, religious conversions, and Paolo Sarpi — on whom she is writing a monograph. She is especially interested in how knowledge of the Islamic world was produced through asymmetric encounters: captured manuscripts, prisoners and converts working as teachers, and the contested transmission of natural knowledge between Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Asia.