Carmen Schmechel is an historian of chemistry and medicine, currently based at the Huygens Institute of the KNAW as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project PRESERVARE. Her realm of inquiry is early modern theories and practices of fermentation in the Low Countries from 1600 to 1800, and especially their role in food preservation.
Before that, at the Freie Universität Berlin, she led a a multi-year project funded by the German Research Council on the topic of early modern fermentation in science and philosophy in early modern Europe (DFG „Fermentation: Eine Wissensgeschichte”, Grant no. 432256662). More broadly, she is interested in the entanglements of theory with practice and observation, and in how we understand and conceptualise transformations of matter, including through the use of analogies (for example, analogies with commonly known natural fermentations such as wine or bread). Her work was published in The British Journal for the History of Science, Ambix, and Early Science and Medicine among others. Her most recent article is “Leaven of Dough, Ferment of Gold: The Breadmaking Analogy in Medieval Metallic Transmutation”, part of the edited Ambix Special Issue “The Chymistry of Life”. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the Division for the History of Chemistry at the European Chemical Society, and on the board of the Fachgruppe Geschichte der Chemie of the German Chemical Society.
