Chiara Petrolini

I am a early modern historian, working on the ways in which Europe, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, built its knowledge of the traditions it called "oriental", and on the religious and political tensions that ran through that same Europe. I am interested in knowledge as a material and relational practice: shaped by texts in motion, by people who translate, and by archives that take form within often asymmetrical relations of power. I studied at the Scuola Normale in Pisa and have worked at the University of Vienna. My current research addresses the intellectual and confessional conflicts of post-Tridentine Europe, with Paolo Sarpi at its core, and the circulations between Europe and extra-European worlds, which I also explore through Pietro Della Valle. I have held fellowships and competitive grants from the Warburg Institute, IFK Vienna, the FWF, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the ÖAW, the DHI Rome, the Folger Shakespeare Library, ENS Paris, and Fondazione Balzan. Recent books: Saperi viventi (FedOA, 2025) and The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters (Brill, 2025).