Anna-Luna Post is interested in how science can help build sustainable societies and foster durable relations of trust between diverse groups of people. Convinced that these broad questions require a historical, holistic approach, she draws on insights and methods from different subfields to study the cultural, political, economic and environmental dimensions of knowledge production in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Her first monograph, Galileo's Fame, considers the cultural dimension of science and is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The book conceptualizes fame as a community-driven process and shows how various scholarly, religious, and cultural communities made, disseminated, and evaluated Galileo Galilei’s fame. Exploring how cultural, religious, and legal frameworks impacted the world of scholarship, it reveals that fame was both coveted for its value and feared for its potential to disrupt order and upend traditional authority.

Post's current research focuses on early modern attitudes toward new knowledge and environmental interventions, especially within the context of early capitalism. Her article “Failure to Drain: Expert Resistance and Environmental Thought in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic” is out in advanced access with Past & Present. In 2019 she published, with Roek Vermeulen, the first English translation of Caspar Barlaeus' oration Mercator Sapiens.

Her Veni-project, (Un)sustainable Expertise, builds on this research and asks how, why, and when local, regional and national authorities in the Dutch Republic relied on expert advice, when they ignored it, and to which tensions this led.

Before coming to Leiden, Post taught History at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (supported by a grant from the Niels Stensen Foundation) and Cambridge University (supported by an NWO Rubicon grant).

NWO Veni (2025)
NWO Rubicon (2022)
Niels Stensen Fellowship (2021)
NWO Promoties in de Geesteswetenschappen (2015)

Post has also received short-term fellowships from the Royal Society, the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences, the Medici Archive Project, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome and the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History in Florence. In 2022, her dissertation on Galileo Galilei was awarded the best KNIR-Van Woudenberg Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Italian studies between 2020-2022.