Maria Anesti

Email:

Telephone: 07464745761 

College: College of Humanities
Discipline: Modern Languages
Department: Chinese
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for translating cultures.

I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. After a Bachelor's Degree in Archaeology (2002) and an MA in the History of Art, I gained a State Scholarship in order to do a PhD in Edinburgh. The title of my thesis was : La femme modele: a dialogue between painting and moral discourse under the Early Third Republic. I spent my writing up year in Paris, France where I remained until 2014. I was awarded my doctorate on November 2012. In 2014 worked in a Museum organising educational programmes for children. In 2015 I applied for the project Nature Entangled (College of Humanities, Department of Modern Languages - Chinese) and was awarded a three-year scholarship in order to write a PhD thesis. The subject I investigate is Oriental Arcadia: The entangled Histories of Living with Nature in China and Europe. Employing case studies of certain figures, images, and literature of the concerned period, I will attempt to reveal how ideas of imitating nature in the British and  French landscape gardens were interrelated with eighteenth-century European discourses on the varied aspects of nature in: moral philosophy, governance, and physiology (nature as vitality in the vital, human body).

Apart from my native Greek, I am fluent in French and English. I can read Latin and Ancient Greek. I have studied German (3 years in a private school).

I am a baroque music enthusiast and I am extremely fond of animals (especially cats)