Reitzig, Stephanie

Stephanie Reitzig is a PhD student in History at Columbia University. She specializes in early modern history of science, with a focus on the intersections of art, gender, and natural history in seventeenth and eighteenth-century central and northern Europe. She has published on the artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), and has presented on topics such as women's craft knowledge in print and gendered materialities in the poems of Margareta van Godewijck (1627-1677).

 Her dissertation, "The 'Worthy Virtuosa': Women and Natural History Collecting, 1650-1800," examines women’s engagement with natural history collecting in early modern Germany, England, and the Netherlands. While prior studies have profiled individual female collectors, this project shifts the focus from women who themselves amassed collections to examine how women procured, organized, displayed, and depicted specimens for other collectors. By yielding new insights into how and by whom specimens were organized, discussed, and exchanged, this dissertation enriches our understanding of women’s contributions to the emergent sciences and of the cultural and scientific significance of collections in early modern Europe.

In fall 2026, Stephanie will be the Gerda Henkel Predoctoral Fellow for the History of Knowledge and the History of Science at the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA) at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. She has also been recognized by the Fulbright Commission (Fulbright Scholar, 2022), the National Science Foundation (Honorable Mention, Graduate Research Fellowship Program, 2025), and the Rhodes Trust (National Finalist, Rhodes Scholarship, 2021). 

Stephanie has served as rapporteur for the Columbia University Seminar in the History and Philosophy of Science and as co-organizer of Columbia's Science Studies Working Group. She has strong interests in the public humanities, and has participated in the Columbia Secondary School Project and the Lehman Center Public History Workshop, in addition to working on exhibitions, public outreach, conservation, and digital humanities projects at the Denver Art Museum, the Newberry Library, Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum.

Prior to attending Columbia, Stephanie completed an A.B. in History at the University of Chicago and a Fulbright fellowship in Vienna, Austria.

Publications

Reitzig, Stephanie. "Maria Sibylla Merian, Women’s Artistic Practices, and Networks of Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Germany." Isis 116, no. 2 (June 2025): 319-34. https://doi.org/10.1086/735776.