Meet our team
Petr Pavlas
Principal Investigator
Petr Pavlas is TOME’s principal investigator and deputy head of the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He has published three monographs and several studies on Comenius, the metaphorics of the book, the idea of a perfect language, and the early modern encyclopaedism. He is in charge of coordinating the TOME research project and investigating the early modern evolution of the book metaphors and mathematical metaphors.
Computational Group
Vojtěch Kaše
Leader
Vojtěch Kaše leads the computation group in the TOME project, directing the development of algorithms for automatic metaphor detection and analyzing their spatio-temporal distribution and diffusion. Originally specializing in the academic study of religion, particularly Early Christianity, his research now extends to data analysis across diverse historical periods and contexts. In addition to his role in TOME, he holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic.
Jan Tvrz
Research Collaborator
Jan Tvrz is a PhD student at the University of West Bohemia. His research topic is a practical application of machine learning in the field of philosophy. In this project, he is a member of the computational team in charge of working with data and machine learning model.
Jana Švadlenková
Research Collaborator
Jana Švadlenková is a PhD student at the University of West Bohemia. In her dissertation thesis, she focuses on synthesis of topics like philosophy, artificial intelligence and fiction. In this project, she is part of the computational team.
Digital-Philological Group
Georgiana (Jo) Hedesan
Leader
Georgiana (Jo) Hedesan leads the TOME Digital Philological team, working to assemble the early modern corpus of alchemical texts. Jo is Departmental Lecturer in History of Science at the University of Oxford, specialising in the history of alchemy and alchemical medicine, now seen through the lens of the digital turn in the humanities. Her first book, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) was published in 2016 by Routledge. A co-edited book (with Tim Rudbøg, Copenhagen), Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present, was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is also preparing a book on immortality and another on the alchemical pursuit for the radical extension of life. She has many interests and passions that she tries to combine in her work and give space for: writing, playing and composing music, philosophy, impromptu art, teaching and IT computing. She concluded her PhD in History at the University of Exeter in 2012, holds two Masters degrees (Western Esotericism, Exeter and Project Management, Leeds), as well as two BAs in History and Economics with a minor in Management Information Systems (University of Nevada).
Alexander Huber
Research Collaborator
Alexander Huber is historian and medievalist by training; he studies PhD at the Charles University in Prague. Within TOME, he assembles and pre-processes the digital corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemical and Paracelsian prints in Latin.
Jana Kodetová
Research Collaborator
Jana Kodetová is classical philologist by training; she studies PhD at the Charles University in Prague. Within TOME, she assembles and pre-processes the digital corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemical and Paracelsian prints in Latin.
Ondřej Kříž
Research Collaborator
Ondřej Kříž is theologian by training; he studies PhD at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. Within TOME, he assembles and pre-processes the digital corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth century alchemical and Paracelsian prints in Latin.
Jindra Kubíčková
Research Collaborator
Jindra Kubíčková is historian of art and science by training; she studies PhD at the Charles University in Prague. Within TOME, she assembles and pre-processes the digital corpus of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century alchemical and Paracelsian prints in Latin.
Intellectual-Historical Group
Lucie Storchová
Leader
Lucie Storchová (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2009) is a senior researcher in the TOME project. She specializes in history of philosophy, Renaissance Humanism and circulation of knowledge and texts in early modern Europe and beyond. She currently works as a Researcher Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. In the TOME project, she leads the research group focusing on early modern intellectual history.
Martin Žemla
Senior Researcher
Martin Žemla is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Renaissance Texts at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, and at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Charles University, Prague. He is also the head of the editorial department OIKOYMENH at the Institute of Philosophy in Prague. His scholarly interests focus on philosophy and religion in the 13th to 17th centuries (esp. German Mysticism, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and Paracelsianism). In the TOME project, he concentrates on metaphors of sensual perception.
Alessandro Nannini
Senior Researcher
Alessandro Nannini (PhD in Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Arts, University of Palermo, Italy, 2015) is senior researcher at the University of Bucharest. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the early modern period, with special regard to aesthetics. He authored a monograph on the relationship between sacred hermeneutics and aesthetics up to Kant (2022) and a monograph on the emergence of both semiotics and aesthetics in the Enlightenment (2023). In the TOME project, he analyzes the metaphorical network related to agriculture and horticulture in their relation to the emergence of early modern encyclopedism.
Lenka Řezníková
Senior Researcher
Lenka Řezníková is a research fellow at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Philosophy. In her research, she focuses on early modern and pre-modern intellectual history. Operating at the intersection between history, literary history and philosophy, she is particularly interested in the history of historical thinking, early modern epistemology, and the relations between textuality and thinking. She also participates in the edition of Comenius’s writings DJAK / Opera Omnia. Within TOME, she investigates metaphors of crafts and playing.
Márton Szentpéteri
Senior Researcher
Márton Szentpéteri is an intellectual historian and design critic, he holds a PhD in Literary Studies (2005) and obtained venia legendi in Design Theory (2013). Dr Szentpéteri has been a tenured full professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest since 2018. He leads the PhD in Design Culture Studies programme of the university that was founded by him. His main interests lie in early modern intellectual and cultural history and modern and contemporary design culture. Within TOME, he investigates early modern architectural metaphors.
Marcela Slavíková
Researcher
Administration and Support
Monika Gottfriedová
Project Coordinator and Administrator
Lenka Kašová
PR and Communication