Sean Coughlin

Sean Coughlin is a historian of science who studies how art and nature intersect in the ancient Greek and Roman world. At Alchemies of Scent, he explores how artistic production served as a model for understanding the natural world, and how firsthand experiences of nature and natural materials are related to the artistic methods that people developed. He also conducts experiments on Greco-Egyptian perfume production techniques recorded by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Galen, and the late antique medical compilers Oribasius, Aetius of Amida, and Paul of Aegina.

Sean is currently a Junior Star Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and an Associate Scientist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He’s held positions in classics and philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Western Ontario (Canada), and has been a visiting fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Einstein Centre: Chronoi, and the Research Training Group “Philosophy, Science, and the Sciences” in Berlin. Earlier in his career, he worked as a cook at an Italian restaurant and as a lab technician in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University in Canada.