Dr Zoe Screti
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Voltaire Foundation
About
Dr Zoe Screti is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Voltaire Foundation and a Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College whose primary interests concern the manuscript cultures of the early modern period (c.1500-1800).
Her Leverhulme ECF project: ‘Burn This: The Destruction of Personal Papers During the European Enlightenment’, unites her interests in manuscript studies and digital humanities approaches to explore archival loss during the long 18th century. Dr Screti was previously the Astra Foundation Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies at the Voltaire Foundation where she produced the Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire, a definitive union catalogue of manuscripts relating to the famed Enlightenment philosopher.
Outside of the Voltaire Foundation, Dr Screti is a Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Research Fellow of the Georgian Papers Programme and an Associated Member of the ‘Équipe Écritures et Lumières’ at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM), Paris. She is also Communications and Media Officer for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS).
Dr Screti holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham. Her thesis, funded by a College of Arts and Law Doctoral Scholarship, explored the relationship between early modern alchemy and religion.
Expertise
- British history (1500-1800)
- Early modern manuscripts
- The Republic of Letters
- Palaeography and codicology
- Voltaire and the Enlightenment
- Early modern science and medicine
- Early modern correspondences
- Materiality of the text
Selected publications
- ‘Cataloguing the Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Cataloguing of Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts’ in New Directions in Digital Textual Studies: Book History, Scholarly Editing, and Curation in Conversation (Bloomsbury, 2026)
- ‘La « Liste des classiques François » : Un échange entre La Beaumelle et Voltaire (Juin 1751)’ (Dix-huitième siècle, 2025)
- ‘An Unpublished Letter from Voltaire to Dr John Carr, a Hertfordshire Headmaster’ (French Studies Bulletin, 2024)
- ‘Finding the Marginal in Marginalia: The Importance of Including Marginalia Descriptions in Catalog Entries’, (Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, 2024)
- ‘Cucurbits and Covenants: Descriptions of Alchemical Vessels as Religious Spaces in Early Modern England’ (BJHS Themes Special Issue- Imagining Alchemy: Visual and Figurative Representations in Pre-Modern Sciences, 2025)
Languages
English