Anna Jerratsch

Anna Jerratsch studied History of Science, Modern History, and Sociology in Berlin and Warwick. Her main research interest lies in the History of Astronomy, the Popularization of Knowledge, and the relationship between Science and Religion, primarily in the early modern period in Europe. Since 2010, she has been an external member of the “Werkstatt des Wissens” of the Comenius-Garden Berlin and contributed to various exhibitions on history of science related themes in Berlin.

In her doctoral research—pursued in the context of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI and the working group “Cosmological Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century” based in Department I at the MPIWG—she analyzed a process of the diffusion and transformation of knowledge by focusing on vernacular cometary pamphlets and the way they present and convey concepts, data, and ideas of natural philosophy, astronomy, astrology, and religion. Having obtained her PhD in 2018, she published her monograph Der frühneuzeitliche Kometendiskurs im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Flugschriften in 2020. Affiliated to the ERC project “Early Modern Cosmology” at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari, Anna is working on her next book project, which deals with the religious contexts of discourses on nature. As a postdoctoral fellow, she began working in digital humanities and is was leader of the working group "Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE)," investigating astral culture and knowledge transfer across space and time from 2021–2023.