Dr. Aleksandra Kaye (she/her)

Postdoctoral Researcher
Department Structural Changes of the Technosphere

Main Focus

Aleksandra Kaye is a historian of knowledge and science who specialises in nineteenth-century Latin America and the partitioned territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her work broadly focuses on cross-cultural interactions, transnational migration, and the circulation of scientific knowledge in relation to the environment. At MPI-GEA, she is committed to better understanding the path dependencies of environmental decisions made in the nineteenth century on the present day, especially in relation to forest management and petroleum extraction. She applies historical network analysis and discourse analysis in her research to track changes in narratives about the topics of interest reflecting the evolution of knowledge and public attitudes over time.

Curriculum Vitae

Aleksandra conducted her doctoral research at the History Department, University College London. In her doctoral thesis, she applied social network analysis methods to historical research and mapped Polish knowledge networks in nineteenth-century Latin America to understand the role migration has played in the production, transfer, and acceptance of scientific knowledge. In 2022, she was a Freer Prize fellow at the Royal Institution in London, and a year earlier, in 2021, an exchange scholar in Sociology at Yale University. In 2023, she joined the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) as a research scholar. There she was affiliated with the Socio-epistemic Networks: Modelling Historical Knowledge Processes project in Department I, investigating how Polish migrants’ work on petroleum prospecting and later exploitation in Argentina was presented in Polish and Argentinian newspapers and periodicals and how that, in turn, affected broader scientific debates. In June 2024, she joined the Department “Structural Changes of the Technosphere” at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology as a postdoctoral researcher.

Recent Publications

Kaye, Aleksandra, Schlattmann, Raphael, Vogl, Malte, Buarque, Bernardo S., Schmitz, Jascha, Weiß, Lea and Welczeck, Laura von. "Socio-Epistemic Networks: A Framework for History of Knowledge". History of Intellectual Culture 3/2024: Experimental Spaces: Knowledge Production and its Environments in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Charlotte A. Lerg, Johan Östling, Jana Weiß, Anne Kwaschik and Claudia Roesch, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024, pp. 253-274. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111291383-012

Kaye, Aleksandra. "Piecing Together ‘Big Pictures’ with Social Network Analysis and Digital Tools." BJHS Themes, 2024, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2024.5

Kaye, Aleksandra. "Shaping Public Perception: Polish Illustrated Press and the Image of Polish Naturalists Working in Latin America, 1844–1885." Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities, 2023, 158 – 180. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202200047



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