Marianna Szczygielska

Marianna Szczygielska is a feminist historian of science. Her research focuses on the history of zoological collecting and animal husbandry to underscore the transformations in human–animal relations in the Anthropocene. She brings queer and decolonial approaches into reflection on animal history. Marianna graduated from the Central European University in Budapest and authored a doctoral dissertation on zoological gardens. She was awarded the Feminist Animal Studies Fellowship in honor of Marti Kheel at the Wesleyan University (CT). Between September 2018 and February 2022, Marianna worked at the MPIWG as a postdoctoral scholar in the “The Body of Animals” Research Theme. In 2022–2025, she has been a researcher in the Department of Ecological Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague as part of the BOAR ERC project examining how veterinary science increasingly mediates human–wildlife interactions. She has also taught at Bard College Berlin, the Central European University, the Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz, and the University of Warsaw. Marianna's current research project concerns the history of private animal collections, environmental management, and imperial science in East-Central Europe in the early twentieth century. At the MPIWG she is member of the “Reclaiming Turtles All the Way Down” Working Group in Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge. With a background in philosophy and gender studies, she studies more-than-human aspects of cultural and environmental change, often engaging creative means of science communication. She has been the associate editor of Humanimalia journal since 2020, and has recently begun working on curatorial and digital humanities projects.