Brooke Peñaloza-Patzak

Brooke Peñaloza-Patzak is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, and Research Associate at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna, Austria. Her work centers on the late eighteenth to early twentieth century production and naturalization of Euronormative hierarchies of human and more-than-human difference; the practical and epistemic labor involved in invoking physical things—from living and once living organisms to objects of culture—as evidence of those hierarchies; and the social and economic circumstances that undergird these ways of knowing and making knowledge. A recipient of the Austrian Science Funds Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship and Marie Jahoda Fellowship, her first book manuscript is entitled With Objects at Hand: The Rise and Fall of the Natural Science of Human Culture, 1860-1930. Along with Tamara Fernando, she is also co-editing a special journal issue called "Making Science of Things: Collections and Knowledge Creation in and Between the Natural and Human Sciences," which includes a co-authored contribution entitled "Mollusks. Between Resource Place, Specimen, and Race, 1860-1920."