Anna Simon-Stickley

Anna Simon-Stickley is a pre-doctoral fellow at Department II of the MPIWG and a doctoral fellow in the Graduate School Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität zu Berlin. While at the MPI, she will be working on a project that looks at the way the sciences and humanities of deep time interacted in nineteenth-century Egypt – how they worked together, and drew on each other’s sources, methods, and expertise. 

Interest in environmental issues and in the history of science first emerged through her bachelor’s thesis in art history on contemporary artistic research on the Anthropocene. This interest was furthered by a master’s at TU Berlin, in which she explored the role of material media in the 19-century life sciences especially – from early eye-tracking devices, microscopes, to botanical drawings from India. She has published on the history of instruments as well as on the intellectual history of the Anthropocene. Beyond academia, she has worked as an editor for the Journal of the History of Knowledge and has recently translated a 850-page book on the history and theory of conceptual history.