Dr. Aleksandra Kaye (she/her)
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. "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