Alara Aygen

Alara is a PhD Student in the Early Modern Europe field. She is interested in exploring the intersections of intellectual and cultural life in the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on women intellectuals. She is especially interested in how questions of gender, authority, and knowledge circulated within Renaissance scholarly networks and how women participated in broader debates about philosophy and cultural identity. 

Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of twelfth-century Islamic scholarship among fourteenth-century Italian humanists, focusing on Pico della Mirandola's engagement with the works of Al-Ghazali. By tracing these cross-cultural and cross-temporal intellectual exchanges, she explored the ways in which Renaissance thinkers grappled with traditions beyond Latin Christendom.

Currently, Alara is also the co-coordinator of the Early Modern History Workshop and the Social Theory Reading Group.