I studied Estonian language, literature, and classical philology and earned my PhD in classical philology in 2002. From 1996-2017 I was a faculty member in classical philology at the University of Tartu, and professor there from 2012-2017. Since 2017 I have been working as senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Center of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and since 2018 as general secretary of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, IANLS.

My primary areas of research are humanist Neo-Latin literature in the Baltic region in the early modern period, the emergence of secular written Estonian language in the 17th century and Latin epigraphics in the Baltic region. Since 2001 I have headed many national grant projects. In 2014-2018 I participated as the Estonian representative in the international COST project, “Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500-1800: A Digital Framework for Multi-Lateral Collaboration on Europe’s Intellectual History”.

Beside my scholarly publications I have translated from classical, medieval and Neo-Latin into Estonian (Tacitus “On the Origin and Settlement of the Germanic peoples”; Livy “From the Founding of the City”; “Deeds of the Romans”, and 17th century print sources on the founding of the University of Tartu) into Estonian.

After receiving my BA (2009) and MA Degree (2012) in Philosophy from the University of Pisa, I obtained my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Scuola Normale Superiore (2018. Thesis: Una filosofia che non prevede resa. La nozione di ‘fides’ nell’opera di Giordano Bruno / On the notion of trust in the works of Giordano Bruno). In 2019 I was a postdoctoral fellow at Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (National Institute for Renaissance Studies) in Florence.

My main research interest is retracing patterns of social inclusion, cooperation, and conflict management in Early Modern moral and political thought, with special attention to trust-based relationships. The goal of my two-year project at IFiS PAN is to investigate theories of trust in early modern thought from the peculiar perspective of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and notably the Academy of Zamość – an educational institution specifically devoted to the teaching of politics.

I am a PASIFIC Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences with a project on “Virtue and Sociability. Teaching Friendship in Early Modern Schools and Universities, 1518-1648”. I did my MA in Philosophy in Munich (2002) and my PhD in European History and Civilization at the European University in Florence (2009). After my PhD, I worked as researcher at the University of Göttingen. From 2014 to 2020, I was Freigeist Fellow for the History of Ethics, in close collaboration with the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Göttingen’s now defunct Institute of Advanced Studies. During my career I received several grants, among them a Grete Sondheimer fellowship at the Warburg Institute in London (2013). I am the author of Pontano’s Virtues. Aristotelian Moral and Political Thought in the Renaissance (2017). My research interests include topics such as Renaissance humanism, Aristotelianism, Dante, early modern book culture, and the history of ethics.

After studying and working as an engineer (1995-1999), I returned to tertiary education to complete MA (2004) and MPhil Degrees (2006) in Classical Philology at the University of Glasgow. I then received a doctorate in philosophy from Glasgow (2011) with a Thesis on formal education and institutional reform in Italy in Late Antiquity. From 2012 until 2015, I was a postdoctoral scholar and lead researcher on the early modern Latin Literature project ‘Bridging the Continental Divide’ at the University of Glasgow, with a focus upon the astronomical literature of Ramist professor Adam King. In 2016, I was postdoctoral fellow at the Ludwig Bolzmann Institute in Innsbruck, Austria, transcribing and translating the mathematical and astronomical Latin educational literature of British and French Ramist professors. In 2017, I was a project researcher on the Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities project ‘William Hunter’s Library: A Transcription of the Early Catalogues’. In 2018, I was postdoctoral Fellow at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, translating and critically analysing the intellectual work of a key Parisian Ramist mathematics professor in the late 16th century. As a library fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh (2019-2020), I was able to continue this work. It then developed into a project (MSCA IF University of Venice, 2020-2022) on the intellectual connections across the broader cosmopolitan network of these Parisian educational reformers across Europe, but especially in the Venetian Republic. As PI of the current CAPIENS project at the University of Venice (2022-2026), I coordinate a research group that is examining the texts and educational activities of Cosmopolitan Academics at Pluralist Institutions with regard to the Emergence of the New Sciences of the early modern period.