Dr. Caterina Agostini specializes in the history of science, material book history, digital humanities, and Italian studies. Her research interests range from examining Galileo Galilei and early modern science, to deciphering ancient texts and designing digital editions and exhibits. At HPSC, Caterina works with Professor William R. Newman to decipher and transcribe Newton’s unpublished manuscripts on alchemy into a digital scholarly edition.
Caterina was Co-PI in The Harriot Papers project, deciphering and making an edition of Thomas Harriot's unpublished treatise, De infinitis, and in The Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers, designing an integrated digital edition. She has consulted for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Europeana, the European Union aggregator for cultural heritage and PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives led by the Frick Collection and the Getty Research Institute.
Additionally, Caterina has taken part in a collaborative digital project to transcribe, translate, and annotate La Sfera, a fifteenth-century book on cosmology, geography, and navigation by Florentine merchant Goro Dati. The project has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to publish a scholarly edition and translation, a digital map, and a textbook with Italica Press.
Caterina earned her Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University. She has taught at Notre Dame, Princeton, and Rutgers. She has been an invited speaker nationally at IIIF, The Frick Collection, Seton Hall, the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University Press, UT Knoxville's Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, and the Consulate General of Italy in New York; internationally, at the University of Oxford, the Renaissance Society of America, Fundação Getulio Vargas, and the University of Göttingen. Her work on early modern science, cultural heritage, and digital humanities has been published in Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities, The Association for Computing Machinery, La parola del testo, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars, and Galilaeana, among others. Her chapter, “Dear Galileo: Letters as Data on Astronomy,” is in press with the University of Chicago Press. Caterina is the recipient of the Eugene Garfield Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society for her ongoing book manuscript on Galilei.
Dr. Agostini co-chairs the International Image Interoperability Framework, making digital images and texts more accessible to wider audiences. She is looking forward to working with the IU Bloomington community in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, as well as exploring Indiana University's implementations of digital standards, at the library and museum.
The College of Arts