The idea that studying the art and architecture of the distant past uniquely prepares students to face and lead through today’s unprecedented challenges defines Petcu’s teaching philosophy. Her courses and graduate training frame early modernity as an archive of captivating narratives, cautionary tales, productive insights, enduring injustices, and alternative ways of co-existing on the planet. She attunes students to premodern art as a trove of materially and spatially grounded thinking where modern technologies, attitudes, and sensibilities originated—but were also questioned and contested.

Petcu has taught diverse courses on art and architecture in early modern Europe and the premodern world, ranging from “Transformations in Renaissance Print” to “Introduction to Art History, 1400-1800.” At ECA, she teaches honours modules based on her current research, such as “Early Modern Architecture and Science” and “Global Architectures of Colonial Latin America.” From 2027, she will lead “Architectural History 1A: Introduction to World Architecture,” a global survey of architecture from antiquity to 1800 annually attended by circa 250 students from across the University.

Having co-developed and directed Edinburgh’s PhD in Architectural History, Petcu supports graduates with insights and skills they need to thrive in fraught intellectual and cultural landscapes. Her PhDs supervisees maintain, challenge, and innovate scholarly traditions while creating a positive impact beyond academia. The three PhD graduates she has advised as a primary and secondary supervisor have gone on to full-time, permanent positions at the University of Cardiff and Belgium’s Royal Museums of Arts and History, obtained contracts to publish their PhD work with Brill and Taylor & Francis, and won major fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British School at Rome, and Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Petcu welcomes applications from prospective PhD students who want to compose theses on architectural cultures of early modern northern Europe and its global networks. She especially encourages projects that focus on ecology or the interplay between architecture and science. 

As a researcher, Petcu examines how knowledge about nature was formed, mediated, and questioned in the artistic cultures of early modern northern Europe—a context that helped give us modern art, science, and ecology. Her book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 through a grant from the Graham Foundation. The book argues that Renaissance images of architecture became forums for scientific investigation and contributes a model for reading architectural images as platforms for scientific thought. The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science received the honourable mention for the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst / German Studies Association’s Literature and Cultural Studies Book Prize in 2025 and was longlisted for a British Society for the History of Science Pickstone Prize in 2026.

Currently, Petcu is completing a book prospectively titled Dürer’s Uncertainty: From the Constraints of Measurement to the Power of the Unknown. The book contends that uncertainties about measurement drove Albrecht Dürer’s most consequential contributions to early modern art and science as well as the visualization of information. In so doing, it recasts the history of Renaissance art and science as a story of productive not-knowing, and models a form of art history writing based in nuanced descriptions of uncertainty. For this project, Petcu received a major, 18-month Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and a yearlong appointment as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. A related article, “Dürer’s Victoria: Contending with the Uncertainty of Measurement,” was published in The Art Bulletin in 2025.

Since 2022, Petcu’s research has prioritized ecological questions. She has begun a third book, Art, Ecology, and Time at the Hinge of Modernity, which examines how modern concepts of nature and time evolved in tandem in early modern Netherlandish art. An ongoing collaboration with Prof. Dr Maurice Saß (Alfter) has produced a co-authored article, “Toward an Ecocritical History of Early Modern Art,” published in the Zeitshrift für Kunstgeschichte in 2025, which won Second Prize for the Renaissance Society of America’s Renaissance Studies Article Prize in 2026.

Petcu’s research has been supported by major fellowships from the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Munich), the Frauenbeauftragte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and Villa I Tatti:  The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She regularly delivers invited lectures to academic and public audiences in the UK, US, and German-speaking world.