Biography

I am an intellectual historian specializing in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance, with a particular interest in intellectual exile, academic networks, and the circulation of knowledge across Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

My path into the history of philosophy began in Kyiv. I studied philosophy at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where I received my BA and MA and, in 2012, completed a PhD in the History of Philosophy. My dissertation grew out of a fascination with Florentine Neoplatonism and with the many ways in which Renaissance thinkers brought ancient philosophical traditions into conversation with the intellectual and religious questions of their own time.

Alongside my work in philosophy, I also pursued a legal education at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. In 2016, I completed an MA in Law with a master’s thesis in constitutional law.

After completing my doctorate, I taught at Kyiv National Linguistic University from 2012 to 2017, first as an Assistant Professor and later as an Associate Professor of Philosophy. Teaching philosophy, logic, critical thinking, humanism, and the methodology of the humanities gradually broadened my interests. I became increasingly curious not only about Renaissance ideas themselves, but also about how later generations of scholars interpreted them—and about the historical circumstances that made some interpretations influential while leaving others forgotten.

This question took my research beyond Ukraine. As a Fulbright Fellow at the State University of New York at Albany, I began studying twentieth-century historians of Renaissance philosophy and the intellectual traditions they established in the United States. Later, as a Moritz Stern Fellow in Modern Jewish Studies at the Lichtenberg Kolleg of the University of Göttingen, I focused on German-Jewish scholars who fled Europe under Nazi persecution. Their stories led me to think more deeply about exile, disrupted academic careers, and the movement of knowledge across languages, countries, and institutions.

My work on émigré scholarship eventually opened a second, closely connected line of inquiry: the historiography of the Italian Renaissance in the Soviet Union. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Harvard University, I traced the intellectual networks that linked European, American, and Soviet scholars during the twentieth century. I became particularly interested in the ways scholarship travelled across political borders—even during the Cold War—and in the exchanges, silences, and misunderstandings that shaped the study of the Renaissance on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This research forms the basis of my forthcoming monograph, The Italian Renaissance in the Soviet Union: Historiography and Cultural Reception, 1920s–1980s. It has also led to an edited volume, Historiographies Lost and Reclaimed: Scholarship on the Italian Renaissance in Central and Eastern Europe. Both books are under contract with Brill.

My current research returns to the intellectual history of exile from a new perspective. With support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I examine twentieth-century German philosophers who were marginalized for racial and political reasons in the 1930s and whose work has remained largely absent from contemporary scholarship. By reconstructing their biographies, philosophical contributions, and academic networks, I hope to recover overlooked texts and to contribute to a broader and more diverse understanding of the philosophical canon.

I am currently based in Göttingen and Venice.

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