Notes on Contributors
Sarah Baumgartner
has recently completed a PhD at the University of Bern. She holds an MA in History and a BSc in Geography of the same University and now works as a freelance historian and archivist. Her research interests include the history of scientific societies in the 18th century and early modern agriculture.
Simona Boscani Leoni
is a Swiss National Science Foundation-Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Bern and senior researcher at the EPFL, Lausanne. She earned a PhD in History from the EHESS in Paris. Her main research interests are medieval social history, iconography, early modern history of knowledge and environmental history. Her current research project focuses on the main actors, networks and places of scientific communication from the 17th century to around 1830. Most recently, she published an annotated edition of the correspondence of the Swiss physician and naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer: “Unglaubliche Bergwunder”. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer und Graubünden. Ausgewählte Briefe, 1699–1707 (2019); an extended edition of this correspondence online on:
Stefanie Gänger
is Professor of Modern History at the University of Heidelberg. She holds an MPhil and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and completed her BA in History at the universities of Augsburg and Seville. Her work considers the histories of science and medicine in late-colonial and early Republican Spanish America, as well as the wider world. Her books and articles examine a variety of themes, ranging from the history of antiquarianism and collecting to that of vernacular medicine and plant trade.
Meike Knittel
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and an associated researcher at the University of Bern’s Historical Institute, where she completed her PhD in 2018. She holds an MA in History from the University of Konstanz and has worked as a curator for an exhibition on the medieval coral trade. Her research interests include the history of collections and the history of knowledge with a focus on natural history museums and 18th-century botany.
Francesco Luzzini
(PhD, History of Science; BS/MS, Natural Sciences) is Affiliate Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Contributing Editor for the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science. His work focuses mainly on the earth and environmental sciences, natural philosophy, and medicine in early modern Europe. His new project Sounding the Depths of Providence focuses on the early modern debate on ore generation and on its influence on the human-environment system: in the upcoming years, this research will be carried out under an EU-sponsored Marie Sklodowska- Curie Global Fellowship (Ca’ Foscari University Venice-Johns Hopkins University).
Jon Mathieu
is editor-in-chief of the journal Histories and professor emeritus of history at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He has widely published on the history of mountain regions. Currently he is working on a Brief Global History of Sacred Mountains since 1500.
Barbara Orland
is a senior lecturer (Privatdozentin) of history of science, technology, and medicine at the pharmacy museum of the University of Basel. The main field of her research and teaching lies in the history of the life sciences and biomedicine from the 17th to the 20th century. In 2011 she replaced the professor for history of science at the University of Konstanz. In 2007/2008 she has been awarded the Käthe-Leichter guest professorship at the University of Vienna. Her current research interests cover different fields of the history of life sciences and biomedicine, e.g. history of pharmaceutical materiality; scientific concepts of fertilization and pregnancy, nutrition and metabolism, biomaterials (like blood and milk).
Irina Podgorny
is a permanent research fellow at the Argentine National Council of Science (CONICET). She studied Archaeology at La Plata University, obtaining her PhD in 1994 with a dissertation on the history of archaeology and museums. She has been a research fellow at the MPIWG in Berlin and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin as well at MAST (Museu de Astronomia) in Rio de Janeiro. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of Science in Context since 2003 and History of Humanities since 2017 and has recently been elected to the Council of HSS (History of Science Society). Her current work includes the history of paleontology, museums of natural history and archaeological ruins.
Chetan Singh
former Professor of History at Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla (India), specialised in medieval north Indian history at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has also been researching and writing on environmental change, history and culture of the western Himalaya for more than two decades. He was Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, from 2013 to 2016. His publications include Himalayan Histories: Economy, Polity and Religious Tradition (2018), Natural Premises: Ecology and Peasant Life in the Western Himalaya, 1800–1950 (1998), and Region and Empire: Panjab in the Seventeenth Century (1991).
Martin Stuber
is senior researcher at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland. He published widely on the history of natural resources (forest, cultivated plants, wetlands, sustainability) and on the history of knowledge in the 18th century (Albrecht von Haller, Scientific Networks, Economic Enlightenment).