Amelia Hutchinson
Amelia is a postdoctoral researcher in the Leibniz Project ‘Commodity Frontiers in Eastern Europe’ (COMFREE), working at the Deutsches Bergbaumuseum on her sub-project, ‘Mining Frontiers in the Kingdom of Hungary, 16th-18th centuries’ (PI: Tina Asmussen).
Having completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at the University of Cambridge, she defended her doctoral thesis at the same institution in February 2026. Her dissertation, supervised by Ulinka Rublack, explored how the material and diplomatic networks of the seventeenth-century Augsburg merchant Philipp Hainhofer were structured by medical knowledge and practice. During her PhD, Amelia was a Leibniz Museums & Collections Fellow at the Deutsches Bergbaumuseum and a Doctoral Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. She taught undergraduates on the papers ‘Europe in the World’, ‘Material Culture in the Early Modern World’ and ‘Introduction to Historical Thinking’. Amelia’s work is published in German History (Article of the Year, 2024) and The Historical Journal.
Visit her profile at the Deutsches Bergbau Museum.
Research interests
Amelia’s research explores the relationships between agents: human, animal, metal, mineral. It combines methodologies and sources – from printed texts and manuscripts, image analysis, object handling, historical reconstruction, and chemical analysis – to ask how and why we came to exist in a world that has separated Nature and Culture to the point of inexorable crisis. She is particularly interested in the narrative of proto-industrial, proto-Capitalist production in early modernity, which retroactively traces linear, teleological narratives of ‘development’ from the sixteenth century to ‘modernity’. Her research challenges this, uncovering how early modern mining communities in Europe were governed not only by the aims of profit-making and technological innovation, but by a cosmological system that prioritised alchemical, astrological, and spiritual knowledge and practices, which relied upon the inextricable interconnectivity of bodies/world. In particular, her research asks how practices of extraction related to the specificities of landscape and environment within this wider cosmological framework.