Marius Buning, born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1979. Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Research Fellow at Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.
Marius Buning received his Ph.D. in History and Civilization from the European University Institute (2013) with a dissertation on the making of a patent system in the early Dutch Republic. Marius has held fellowships at Harvard University, The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research interests focus on the origins of intellectual property; the relationship between science and technology; how experiment bears upon theory; and the part played by the early modern state in defining these respective fields.
I started out as a classical guitarist at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. After wandering around the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and the Humboldt University in Berlin, I obtained an MA (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. My thesis for the Department of Cultural Studies dealt with the debate on free will between Erasmus and Luther.
In 2013, I defended my PhD at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. My thesis examined the history of patent law in relation to the development of early modern science. Focusing on the Dutch Republic between 1581-1621, it reconstructed the legal background to the patents system, the social construction of patent procedures, and the ways in which new inventions were being tested. I argued that the institution of a patent system was an integral part of early modern state-formation and that it provided a distinct ‘working model’ for how to arrive at truth claims through the use of experimental method.
In 2014, I started a postdoctoral project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). Elaborating on my interest in the history of intellectual property rights, I worked on the history of printing privileges (a form of copyright). The research, which I intend to publish in a second book, examines how the Dutch Republic used its control of printing privileges to define ‘useful’ knowledge, in relation to its own development as an early modern state.
In 2017, after leaving MPIWG, I became a DRS Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, where I am now working on a critical edition of Dialectike ofte Bewijskonst (Leiden: Plantin, 1585), a fascinating little book on logic written by the famous engineer-scientist Simon Stevin (1548-1620).
You can find more information about my past and current research on the projects page.
Marius Buning, born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1979. Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Research Fellow at Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.