Lavinia Gambini
Lavinia is a second-year PhD student at Jesus College, working on a project titled 'Everyday Humanism' and Greekness in Early Modern Italy, 1566-1669. Her interests lie in global intellectual history, material culture, and the history of the early modern Mediterranean.
Her project explores the appreciation of contemporary Greek expertise, crafts, and knowledge across early modern Italy. By focusing on places of encounter and coexistence with Greek communities, she wants to uncover how early modern Italians sought Greek objects as well as healers, artisans, and other experts in their everyday life.
Amongst others, Lavinia is particularly interested in notions of medical and botanical Greekness and how these can be situated between the classical tradition and the quest for global medical novelties.
In September-November 2022, Lavinia will join the Medici Archive Project (Florence) as an Eva Schler Predoctoral Fellow.
In June-September 2023, Lavinia will join the German Study Centre in Venice as a predoctoral scholar in residence (http://www.dszv.it/new_alumni/lavinia-gambini/).
Her postgraduate studies have been generously supported by the Cambridge International Trust, the Gurnee Hart Fund (MPhil), and Jesus College, Cambridge.
Lavinia obtained a BA in History and Philosophy from Humboldt-University in Berlin (2020), where she was a research assistant to the Chair of Early Modern European History (2017-2020). In 2019, she interned at the German Historical Institute in Rome. Her BA dissertation on eschatology in the early Enlightenment won the Droysen-Prize and the Vice-Chancellor's Humboldt-Prize (2021).
She came to Cambridge in 2020 to pursue an MPhil in Early Modern History (2021). Her dissertation focused on 'religious chorographies' of the Aegean Archipelago in seventeenth-century Europe.
Lavinia is the co-convenor and co-founder of the 'Oceanic and Maritime History Workshop' (https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/oceanic-and-maritime-history-workshop, @CamOceanicHist).
Lavinia is an Italian national from Rome and has lived in Rome, Vienna, and Berlin.