Divna Manolova is a researcher of the History of Science and Byzantine Studies and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Literary Studies – Greek Section of Ghent University. She works on theories of space and dimensionality in Byzantine cosmological and astronomical texts and diagrams, and studies the teaching and learning of the astral sciences and philosophy in Palaiologan Byzantium. Her current project – COSMOPOET – studies the medieval Greek and early modern manuscript tradition of the didactic poem Phaenomena by Aratus of Soli (d. before 239 BCE) and compares it to the transmission of the introductory astronomical treatise The Heavens by Cleomedes (first century CE). COSMOPOET aims to rethink the relationship between poetry and astronomy and ultimately, it investigates medieval Greek solutions to the question as to how to explain the cosmos through literary means. Divna is also a member of EIDA – Editing and analysing hIstorical astronomical Diagrams with Artificial intelligence, an interdisciplinary project joining a team of historians of sciences with computer vision researchers for the development of specific algorithms for retrieval and analysis of the historical diagrams.
