Fitxa persona

Laura Guinot Ferri is Assistant Professor in History of Science at the University of Valencia. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Valencia, specialising in Early Modern History. She has been a predoctoral (2015-2018) and postdoctoral (2023-2025) researcher at the Institute for Women's Studies and the Department of Early Modern and Contemporary History at the same institution, as well as a postdoctoral researcher in the European project CIRGEN (ERC Advanced Grant 787015) between 2019 and 2023. She has undertaken research stays at the Università di Bologna, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Queen Mary University of London, and the Università degli Studi di Palermo.

Her research has developed across four fields: the history of women, the history of spirituality, the history of medicine, and the history of reading, all approached from a cultural perspective particularly attentive to case studies. Firstly, she has explored the relationships between women, medicine, and religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in her book Mujeres y Santidad. Sanadoras por mediación divina. Un estudio desde la microhistoria (siglos XVII-XVIII) (Comares, 2021); and also in “Devociones del parto y maternidad simbólica: la circulación de reliquias entre mujeres nobles en el siglo XVIII” (Revista de Historia Moderna, 2025). Secondly, she has analysed the role of women in cultural mediation processes through her coordination of the book Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century. Women across Borders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and the dossier Agencia y mediación cultural en femenino: bibliotecas, correspondencia y redes transnacionales en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Arenal, 2022). Thirdly, she has worked on women, reading, Catholicism, and the Enlightenment in articles such as: “«Para la más fácil inteligencia de todos y de todas». La literatura para religiosas en el siglo XVIII” (Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie IV, Historia Moderna, 2024). Currently, her research interests focus on the relationship between women, bodies, spaces, and objects, with particular attention to medical, hagiographical, and gender discourses surrounding the construction of holiness in the eighteenth century