Full time members
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB-iHC).
Since 2019 I am the president of the European Society for Environmental History, a recognition of my work in that field. Although rooted in that discipline, I have developed a transdisciplinary research agenda blending environmental history with political ecology and environmental humanities. In 2013 I became the director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm making it a global player in that emerging field.
My research clusters around three themes: environmental justice; migrations and the environment; and fascism and nature. Methodologically, I avoid any dichotomy between nature and society. Thematically, from toxicity to fascism, from migration to mountain communities, my research focuses on processes of expropriations and imposition of expert knowledge and the resistance of subaltern communities.
I am interested in directing Ph.D. and postdoctoral research in the following areas:
- migration and environment (migrant workers, transformations of landscape, transfer of knowledge and practices, etc.)
- fascist regimes and nature (politicization of nature, autarkic policies,
- environmental justice and conflicts (toxicity, pollution, social inequalities, mobilizations, etc.)
- history of environmentalism (especially subaltern environmentalism)
- disasters
- nature on trial (judicial environmental cases)
I teach courses on environmental history, political ecology, and environmental humanities.
If you wish to know more about my work, you can listen some of my talks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_WfgC5Ons8&t=1452s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlGghZFcP0c&t=1920s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3xhZ5LBp2U&t=689s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IGlGQq_no&t=104s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4KwVGEvU6w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCRaBqtAwsw&t=63s
Trained as a physicist, I obtained a PhD in History of Science at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). I have worked at Centre Alexandre Koyré (Paris), Centre National d'Études Spatiales (Toulouse), Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (Paris), National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC), Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (Marne), Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
My research explores the history of satellite remote sensing technology. More specifically, the history of the imbricated techniques, knowledge, practices, institutions, actors and ideas involved in the production, circulation and use of data generated with Earth-orbiting satellites, and the power relations they articulate, as well as their environmental, social and political implications.
Amongst others, I have been awarded prizes by NASA and History of Science Society (2015), American Institute of Physics (2016), European Space Agency (2017), and International Committee for the History of Technology (2016 and 2021). Since 2022, I am the PI of the project “CLIMASAT. Remote-sensing Satellite Data and the Making of Global Climate in Europe, 1980s-2000s” funded with an ERC Starting Grant.
Jorge Molero has been a Full Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a bachelor’s in Medicine and Surgery from the Universidad de Granada, where he also earned his PhD in 1989. His thesis in the field of the history of science earned the extraordinary doctoral award. His academic and research career have been conducted at the Universidad de Granada (1983-1991) and the Universidad de Zaragoza (1991-2000). He is currently the coordinator of the History of Medicine Unit (Philosophy Department) at the UAB’s Faculty of Medicine, where he does most of his teaching.
His avenues of research have focused on analysing the relationship between medicine and the colonisation process in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, the history of social diseases (tuberculosis and malaria) and the study of Spain’s health administration in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently analysing the interactions between health and illness processes and subordinated social groups in contemporary Spain, primarily the Spanish libertarian movement.
He works in four branches of research. He has been accredited by ANECA as a member of the corps of university chairs. Over the years, he has been the lead researcher in eight research projects within the National Plan and a researcher and lead researcher in a European Marie Sklodowska-Curie project. In terms of training researchers, he has directed nine doctoral theses, two master’s theses and 15 end of degree master’s projects.
Prof. Dr. Annette Mülberger [Director of the Department for Theory & History of Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences; University of Groningen]
Research interests: Studies on the human mind (19th and 20th century) and history and philosophy of psychology. Current topics: early experimental and applied psychology; criminology and juridical psychology; practices of psychological testing and measurement; crisis debates in psychology and boundaries of science and the history of spiritualism and parapsychology.
Professional service: Director of the Centre for History of Science (UAB) (2016-2019), International Representative of the Forum for the History of Human Sciences (HSS); President of the European Society for Human Sciences (2003-2007; 2016-2018); guest researcher at the Casa Oswaldo Cruz/ Fiocruz (Rio de Janeiro); visiting professor at Uni. Sapienza (Roma) and at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin).
Journals: Dynamis (history of science and medicine) (co-editor); Theory & Psychology (co-editor); History of Psychology; Journal for the History of the Behavioural Sciences; Arqueivos Brasileiros de Psicologia; European Yearbook for the History of Psychology; Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia.
Director iHC (2020-2023)
Full Professor & ICREA-Academia researcher (2018)
Fields of interest: Science in the public sphere in 19th Century, Science and power in the 20th Century.
I am Full Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and ICREA Acadèmia Fellow (2009 & 2018). Following degrees in both chemistry (URL) and history (UB), I took a PhD in the History of Science at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and held postdoctoral positions in the Modern History Faculty, University of Oxford, and the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie/ CNRS, Paris. I am also a founding member of the international research group “Science and Technology in the European Periphery” (STEP), and former Director of the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC) at the UAB
I have written widely on the history of chemistry and natural dyestuffs, and the history of the popularization of science (18th-20th centuries). My research focuses now on Urban History of Science, as a way to explore the complex interactions between science and the city in several cultural contexts. In that “urban” context, I am working on the “Hunger Artists’ Project”, as a new research field on cultural history of science at a European level.
I have also been working on a new history of chemistry in twentieth-century Spain, with a particular emphasis on professional chemists’ role during Franco’s dictatorship and the coproduction of science and power in different political regimes. The book, The Politics of Chemistry (Cambridge, 2019) is a key result of this work.
In the framework of my ICREA-Acadèmia 2018 award, I develop the project, “Chemopolis”: The City of Chemistry in the Twentieth Century”. It is an attempt to build up a new big picture of chemistry in the twentieth-century at a European level. It includes, among other topics: cosmopolitanism; popular chemistry; toxics, experts and users; invisible science and the making of ignorance; pure-applied dichotomies; chemists as intellectuals in democratic and dictatorial regimes; chemical technology and the "natural-artificial" boundaries.
After studies in philosophy, history, and political science at the University of Göttingen and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), I obtained my PhD in 2007 from Marburg University in Germany. Before joining ICREA in 2014, I held positions at Marburg (1995-2000); UCSD (2000), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities (2001-2005), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2005-2009), and the Dept. of Philosophy, UAB (Ramón y Cajal Scholar, 2009-2014). I am also a member of the CEHIC (UAB), the LOGOS group (UB), the Kant-edition project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and Associate Research Fellow at the Wundt Center for Philosophy & History of Psychology, Universidade Federal Juiz de Fora (Brazil). In 2019, I became elected member of the Academia Europea.
How is reason or rationality understood in philosophy and the human sciences? How should it be understood? What is its function in various domains? These are the guiding questions for my research, which comprises topics reaching from early modern philosophy - esp. Immanuel Kant's philosophy - up to current discussions at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and economics. I study aspects of reason in Kant's philosophy in relation to his notions of truth and the systematicity of science; I analyze the history as well as the potentials and limits of current psychological theories of rationality; and I also study their role in politics, social science, and ethics. I'm moreover interested in the philosophy of knowledge, mind, and science. Methodologically, I combine tools of analytic philosophy and history of science: I am unconvinced by widespread opinions according to which they cannot, or should not, be integrated.
Coordinator of the Bacherlor's Degree in Science, Technology and Humanities.
Tenured Professor of History of Science.
Fields of interest: History of contemporary physics, science and humanities.
Xavier Roqué was educated as a physicist and historian of science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and did his post-doc at the University of Cambridge and the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques in Paris. He has been a visiting researcher at Cambridge and Uppsala universities. He is a member of the Philosophy Department. He has taught in the bachelor and post-graduate programmes in the faculties of Sciences, Biosciences, Philosophy and Humanities and Education. He has served as the director of the Centre d'Història de la Ciència, the coordinator of the master’s in the History of Science: Science, History and Society (UAB-UB) and coordinator of the doctoral programme in the History of Science. His research examines the social and cultural history of contemporary science, with particular attention on experimental practices, material culture, theoretical creativity and the relationships between science, politics and economics. He has published studies on the history of radioactivity, relativity and quantum physics; on physics in Spain; and on women and science, and he has edited and translated Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Heinrich Hertz and Niels Bohr.
Coordinator of the PhD Program (2020- )
Associate Professor (2020)
Fields of interest: History of Human Sciences, History of Psychology, History of Science and Gender.
Mònica Balltondre is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Psychology at the UAB. Her research focuses on female subjectivities constructed by past scientific theories. She has studied mediaeval spiritual women and spiritualism and spiritism from the early 20th century, primarily in Spain. She had a post-doc and visiting grant in the “História das Ciências e das Técnicas e Epistemologia” (HCTE) at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janerio (UFRJ, 2015); at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS) at the University of California, Berkeley (2014); and at FIOCRUZ (Rio de Janeiro, 2010).
Coordinator of the Master's Degree in History of Science (2017-2023)
Associate Professor (2015)
Fields of interest: Urban narratives about nature; history of life science; urban history; scientific communication and media/film studies.
A PhD in Biology (Universidad de Salamanca, 1993) and MA in History of Science (UAB, 2010), Carlos Tabernero has worked as a molecular biologist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI-NIH, 1992-1998, USA); as a teacher and designer of educational programs at Children's Studio School, in Washington DC (1999-2003, USA); as a researcher in communication studies at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC; 2005-2010); and joined, in 2005, the Centre for the History of Science (CEHIC-UAB), where he is an Associate professor of history of science.
His teaching and research focuses on urban narratives about nature (the intersections between the history of life sciences, urban history, scientific communication and media studies), mostly in relation to cinema, television, literature and the processes of construction and circulation of natural history knowledge in the 20th century.
He currently teaches in the degrees of Medicine, Biology, Biomedical Sciences and Genetics, as well as in the official Master's Degree in History of Science: Science, History and Society (CEHIC), which he also coordinates, the Official Master's Degree in Teaching in Secondary Schools, and the CEHIC PhD Program in History of Science. He has published extensively in all the fields in which he has worked.
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez is an Associate Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Previously he was a researcher fellow and adjunct professor at the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Caparica (Lisbon) for eight years. He has also been a visiting scholar in Mexico, London, Berlin and Geneva. As historian of technology, his focus has been the twentieth-century Iberian Peninsula and his main interest is to understand how political authority and expert authority are entangled and resisted. His last works deal with the relationship between technology and revolution, the political role of technological display and alternative exhibitions, and the bridge between the social construction of technology and what could be called “social destruction of technology”. He is interested in crossing memories, useful arts and fine arts to imagine futures based on mutual aid, and in creating spaces to bring academics, activists and local communities together.
Elena Serrano is Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut de Historia de la Ciència (iHC) of the UAB since January 2023. Previously, she was part of the CIRGEN project (Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment, cirgen.eu). She trained at the former Center for the History of Science (CEHIC) at UAB and the University of Cambridge and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Science History Institute in Philadelphia and the University of Sydney.
Her work combines methodologies from the history of science and medicine, material culture, cultural history, and gender studies. She has published on female networks and knowledge production (Notes and Records ), gender and material culture in the history of knowledge, and, most recently, on love prediction technologies (Isis, 2021). Her book, Ladies of Honor and Merit: Gender, Useful Knowledge and Politics in Enlightened Spain, has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (2022).
iHC Secretary
Associate Professor Serra Húnter
Fields of interest: History and philosophy of technology; Policy of dissemination and musealization of science and technology in the 20th century.
Serra Húnter Associate Professor. I was trained in Philosophy at the Universitat de Barcelona and in History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Before joining the CEHIC, I taught at the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Universidade de Lisboa, where I was postdoc researcher at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT) from 2015 to 2019.
My main overarching research interest is the intersection between politics and the popularization of science and technology, with a strong emphasis on the politics of display.
I am preparing a book called The Machine on Display: Technology, History and Politics at the New York Museum of Science and Industry (1912-1951), under contract with Brill. By following this nomadic museum through Midtown Manhattan, the book will illuminate the political dimensions of the birth and transformations of industrial museums in the United States. It will also challenge the standard narrative on the history of “interactivity”. Parts of the story have already been published in History of Science and the Science Museum Group Journal. I have published on the politics of technological fun in amusement parks in the Iberian Peninsula, and I have recently co-edited, with Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, a special issue of the journal Centaurus about the banalization of nuclear technologies.
I am currently engaged in a historiographical reflection on how to advance towards a political history of “interactivity”, as well as in a history of international science popularization policies as tools for cultural diplomacy at the League of Nations and the early years of UNESCO.
Santiago Gorostiza is an environmental historian working at the intersection of political ecology and the history of science. Since 2019, he has served as the Spanish representative to the European Society of Environmental History.
The Spanish Civil War and postwar have been the key focus of his research, with special attention to anarchist collectivisations of water and land, on the one hand, and the autarkic projects of the Franco dictatorship, on the other. He continues investigating the fortification of the Pyrenean border and guerrilla warfare in postwar Spain.
The production of knowledge about climate and the environment is a more recent research interest. Santiago has studied responses to drought during the 17th century, including the writing of a manuscript on urban water supply for the city of Barcelona, known as Llibre de les Fonts (1650). Other examples include scientific and political debates about river sediment transport since the 19th century or controversies about the relation between potash mining and river salinisation from the 1920s to the present day.
Santiago completed his PhD at the Centro de Estudos Sociais of the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) as a Marie Curie ITN fellow. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and at the Centre for History at Sciences Po (Paris), where he was part of the Shifting Shores project and remains an affiliated researcher. At the Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Santiago works on the ERC-funded project “CLIMASAT: Remote-sensing Satellite Data and the Making of Global Climate in Europe, 1980s-2000s”.
Grigoris Panoutsopoulos is a post-doctoral researcher working on the ERC-funded project “CLIMASAT: Remote-sensing Satellite Data and the Making of Global Climate in Europe, 1980s-2000s”. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics, a M.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and a PhD in History of Science from the University of Athens. His dissertation, which is titled "Planning CERN's Large Hadron Collider: An Entanglement of Physics, Technology, and Diplomacy", showcases an in-depth understanding of the intricate interplay between Big Science infrastructures, industry and politics. Grigoris possesses a broad range of research interests, including science diplomacy, the material culture of science, the history of Big Science, the relationship between European integration and scientific networks, climate and weather data, and the history of European satellite systems. With the support from a series of fellowships and grants, he has given presentations at international conferences and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
I am Associate Professor of History of Science and Medicine in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and obtained my PhD in History of Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2007. My PhD dissertation was published as Energía y cultura. Historia de la termodinámica en la España de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX (Bogotá, 2011). I have been visiting professor at universities in Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, and Germany. In 2019, I was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and since 2022 I hold a postdoctoral position (investigador María Zambrano) at the Institut d’Història de la Ciència, UAB.
I am the editor of the section “Social Studies of Health” of the journal Revista Ciencias de la Salud (Colombia), and assistant editor of the journal História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos (Brazil). I was member of the steering committee of the international research group “Science and Technology in the European Periphery” (STEP), and one of the founders (and current coordinator) of the international research network on “Historical and Social Studies of Nutrition and Food in Latin America” (Rehsnal).
My research focuses on the history of nutrition and eugenics; public health and the relationships between science, experts, power, and State in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries; and, more recently, food history. In my investigations, I attempt to articulate different theoretical and conceptual aspects from science, governmentality, and cultural studies to account for processes of co-production of natural and social orders. Currently, I am leading a research project on “Assembling the Food Problem in Latin America during the beginning of Development, 1930-1960”. The most recent result of this project is the edited volume El hambre de los otros. Ciencia y políticas alimentarias en Latinoamérica, siglos XX y XXI (Bogotá, 2021; coedited with Joel Vargas). The book offers a critical analysis of the relationships (at local and international levels) between scientific expertise, the State, and (geo)politics in the processes of conceiving and intervening health and food problems in Latin America over the last century.
My expertise and leadership in the history of science, health and food in Latin America is internationally recognized. I have been invited to publish articles in renowned peer-reviewed publications such as the history of science journal Osiris (vol. 35: Food Matters), or the reference editorial project on Latin American history, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. My work on these issues has also appeared in international journals such as Science in Context, Hispanic American Historical Review, and História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos. Furthermore, I was invited in 2021 to be a collaborator for the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award “Connecting three worlds: socialism, medicine and global health after WWII”. This 5 years research project pioneers a new history of global health in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Vincenzo Politi is a philosopher of science. His main research areas are: the History and Philosophy of science, with a particular focus on scientific change, scientific progress, and the social, practical, and political dimension of science. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Science in 2015 from the University of Bristol (UK), where he pursued his research with the support of the prestigious Darwin Trust of Edinburgh for Philosophy of Science. He is currently a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow at iHC-UAB (2022-2025).
Before joining iHC, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM (Mexico City, 2017-2018); at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (Paris, France, 2018-2019), where he collaborated to the EU Horizon2020 project "Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice" (RRI-Practice); at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Lyon 3 (Lyon, France, 2019), for the nationally funded project PartiSCiP (“Citizen science: new epistemological perspectives on scientific objectivity”); at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway, 2020-2022) where he worked on the RRI aspects of PINpOINT, an interdisciplinary research project on precision oncology.
He has published original research articles in international peer-reviewed philosophy journals such as Synthese, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Theoria, Journal for the General Philosophy of Science, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. In 2019, he was the guest editor of “Questions about Science”, a special issue of the journal Theoria.
Studies
PhD in History. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (currently).
M.A. Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Theory. The University of Leeds (2015).
B.A. Social and Cultural Anthropology. UNED (2019).
B.A. Archaeology. Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2014).
Areas of interest
(Trans)Feminism, cultural history, the history of gender and sexuality, (early) modern history, archaeology, the history of the Mariana Islands.
I am currently exploring the role played by sexuality and sexual encounters in the evangelisation and Spanish colonisation of the Mariana Islands (western Pacific) during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Laura Valls Plana is a postdoctoral fellow thanks to a Margarita Salas Grant · 3 years for the training of young doctors, which will take place during a two-year research stay at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (MNHN-EHESS-CNRS) in Paris and a third year at the IHC-UAB. She will pursue her research on the urban cultures of natural history at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this case, with a special emphasis on the concept and material culture of "animal skins" and the circulation of knowledge, objects and actors between Paris and Barcelona. The aim is to analyze the change in the public presentation of animals in natural history museums in relation to a broader urban culture of transformation, circulation and consumption of "animal skins" in the European context.
In 2019, she has defended the thesis “Civic nature. Science, territory and city in the park of the Citadel of Barcelona” in which she studied this urban space as a privileged place in the configuration of the conceptions of the nature and of a certain style of divulging of the natural sciences. Special Award Doctorate, academic year 2019/2020.
In the professional field she has had a long career in the field of scientific culture. It should be noted that she has worked for thirteen years in the CSIC Delegation in Catalonia, coordinating various outreach projects with a complex focus, combining interdisciplinarity, digital and face-to-face media, innovative and traditional formats, current issues and reflective content. It is also worth mentioning that she is currently participating in the curation of the new permanent exhibition of the Museu Martorell (the historical headquarters of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, MCNB) on the global/local history of the natural history museums, with Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC) and the MCNB team. [Opening: 2023]