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Dr. Sebestian Kroupa

Dr. Sebestian Kroupa

University of Cambridge

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Fellow during the summer term 2022

Plants on the Move: The Making of Cross-Cultural Knowledge in Southeast Asia, c.1650-1750

Sebestian Kroupa is a historian of early modern natural sciences and medicine in global contexts. He is a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Prior to this appointment, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and worked as Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded Renaissance Skin Project at King's College London. Sebestian’s research seeks to uncover the variety of agencies across cultures, genders, and social status involved in the making of knowledge amidst the early modern expansion of global interactions, which engendered the birth of medicine, science, and the modern world. He has published on Indigenous tattooing in the Philippines, long-distance networks of knowledge exchange, and Renaissance geography and gorillas, as well as co-editing a special issue on science and islands in Indo-Pacific worlds.

At the Munich Centre of Global History, Sebestian will be working on his monograph, Plants on the Move: The Making of Cross-Cultural Knowledge in Southeast Asia, c.1650–1750. Through the lens of the activities and networks of Georg Joseph Kamel, a Bohemian Jesuit pharmacist stationed in Manila, Plants on the Move traces the production and circulation of knowledge around the globe: from southeast Asia and the cosmopolitan worlds of the Indo-Pacific to metropolitan Europe and colonial America. Kamel’s access to Philippine nature turned him into a major agent in the worldwide network of the trade in drugs and curiosities that extended from Mexico across the Philippines to England and traversed the boundaries of the Spanish Habsburg, English, Dutch, and
Portuguese empires. Drawing on sources from three continents in five languages, the book reconstructs in micro-historical detail how knowledge was made at the frontiers of empires by a variety of agents across cultures, genders, and social status, including Filipino wise women, Muslim traders, Catholic missionaries, and European scholars. Thus, Plants on the Move contributes to recent efforts to decentre and decolonise European histories of science, medicine, and modernity.