Giulia Rispoli

Giulia Rispoli is an Assistant Professor in History of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, and a Visiting Scholar in Department I of the Institute.

She specialized in the history and epistemology of the modern natural sciences, especially in Russia, Europe, and North America. She worked and published on a variety of topics such as the history of systems theories—in particular, Alexander Bogdanov’s Tektology as an alternative to the general systems theory and cybernetics—the social study of science in the Soviet context, biosphere theories in Russia, Europe and American history, Earth System Science, environmental diplomacy during the Cold War, Anthropocene history, and anthropogenic markers. Recent research interests include geoanthropology, the study of forgotten sources of environmental thinking, the Nuclear Winter, and the relationship between art, science, and literature.

Her current research is titled “Planetary Genealogies, Historicizing the Anthropocene." It contributes to the study and evaluation of the historical, epistemological, and scientific foundations of the Anthropocene, a term that indicates a new geological epoch characterized by the global impact of human activities on the planet. In particular, she studies and reconstructs the genealogies of two notions – the "biosphere-geosphere" developed in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the “Earth system“ of Western ascendance – and how they help to reveal different ways in which our planet was conceived and represented in the twentieth century in relation to human influence, and how they become an object of global politics.

Over the past three years, she has co-organized the interdisciplinary project and online multimedia publication “Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Contexts,” which emerged from a collaboration between the MPIWG, the HKW, and the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) to study the diverse systemic historical trends and processes that are manifested in the global distribution of sedimentary and geochemical markers used by the AWG to define the Anthropocene’s “golden spike.”

Over the past 6 years, Giulia has been a Research Scholar at the Institute. Moreover, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and at the Centre Alexander Koyré in Paris, and taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, at the Cohn Institute of Tel Aviv University, and at the Osteuropa-Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin.