Giulia Rispoli

Giulia Rispoli studied history and philosophy of science at the University of Rome, where she received her PhD in 2015, and at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her research interests include the history and epistemology of systems thinking—in particular Aleksandr’s Bogdanov’s Tektology as an alternative to the General System Theory and Cybernetics—and their declination and convergence with biosphere theories, social studies of science, and environmental diplomacy during the Cold War.

Giulia is a research scholar in the research group “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene,” where she investigates the conceptual history and genealogy of the Anthropocene notion. She studies key moments in the interaction of large-scale perspectives, where systems theory integrates with global and planetary ecology and led to the emergence of Earth system science. Within this framework, she also looks at the establishment of international scientific endeavours, such as the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme (MAB) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP).

Giulia is working primarily on two projects: The first one is part of a collaboration between the MPIWG, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). The AWG is a body of the Sub-commission of Quaternary Stratigraphy charged with assessing the Anthropocene as a formal geological time unit. In this project, Giulia coordinates research on the diverse systemic historical trends and processes that are manifested in the global distribution of sedimentary and geochemical markers. These are currently being selected by the AWG in their search for a “Golden Spike.” The second project explores the ideas of human geometabolism in the twentieth century, in particular “the geosphere-biosphere” and the “Earth-system,” and how they have reflected changes in scientific methodologies that in turn can explain different policy strategies in different phases of the post-war debate, and the Cold War. A book manuscript is being prepared to present the results of this project.

Giulia has been a visiting scholar at the Moscow State University and the York Center for Complex Systems Analysis of the University of York, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Muséum Natural d’Histoire Naturelle and the Centre Alexander Koyré in Paris. She has taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the Cohn Institute of Tel Aviv University. She currently lectures at the Osteuropa-Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin.