Tracy Wietecha

Tracy Wietecha is a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, specializing in medieval philosophy and the history of premodern science and philosophy. Previously, she was a guest lecturer at Technische Universität Berlin. Tracy was the 2020 Lorenz Bausch fellow at the Leopoldina National Academy of Science in Halle (Saale). She completed her doctorate in February 2021 at LMU München with a dissertation on the ethical commentaries of the thirteenth-century natural scientist and philosopher Albert the Great. She holds an MA in philosophy from Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and an MA in sacred theology from Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit, Michigan). Her two main areas of research are, first, ethics and the problem of the nature, character, quality, and quantity of knowledge necessary for attribution of moral responsibility, and, second, the history of botany and history of medicine in the early modern period approached through philosophical analysis.

Tracy’s current research explores the intersection of the Aristotelian sciences with the empirical investigation of nature in sixteenth-century colonial Mexico, particularly at the Royal University of Mexico. Her past research has investigated knowledge networks between early members of the Leopoldina and the Latin Americas. She has recently published in Nature Careers and Notes and Records.

Tracy has taught courses at LMU München, Bard College Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin.

Publications

• “Losing Foreignness: Johann Sigismund Elsholtz on the Meaning of Plants in the Pleasure Gardens of Berlin,” Notes and Records, 28 February 2024. 

• “How Leading a Postdoc Network Boosted My Career Prospects,” Nature Careers, 20 February 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00207-y

• “On Method in Reading the De ente et essentia,” International Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2016), 155-170.

• “Albert the Great’s Ethical Commentaries and Al-Farabi’s De Intellectu.”  In Homo – Natura – Mundus: Human Beings and Their Relationships. Proceedings to XIV SIEPM International Congress, ed. Roberto Hofmeister Pich, 339–350. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

• Katja Krause and Tracy Wietecha, “Albert the Great on Negative-Mystical Theology as the Summit of Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology. Oxford University Press (in press).