Christoph Rosol

Group leader of the umbrella project “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene” and researcher and curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (HKW).

Christoph Rosol studied history of science and media studies in Berlin and Toronto. He was a stipendiary at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC in 2008 and in the graduate program Media of History – History of Media (Erfurt, Weimar, Jena) from 2008 to 2011. In 2012 he became a predoctoral fellow at the MPIWG and, later that year, also research associate in The Anthropocene Project of the HKW. Currently, he is a member of the curatorial team of the follow-up project Technosphere.

Because the MPIWG is a main cooperation partner of these two programs, his position in Department I focuses specifically on the development of the transdisciplinary Anthropocene Curriculum, which he co-heads with Katrin Klingan of the HKW. This work at the intersection of the natural sciences, humanities, design, and arts enables him to engage productively with the numerous different facets of Anthropocene research, and also to study it at the same time.

His ongoing doctoral research deals with the (pre)history and epistemic foundations of General Circulation Models (GCMs), which are derived from numerical weather prediction techniques but have now evolved into a core component of so-called Earth system models. Based on a historiographic reframing of the objects, techniques, and longue-durée ideals of rationally modeling atmospheric motion (i.e., the excessively hybrid configuration of empirical, theoretical, and technological practices that stabilized an epistemic manifestation of the unrepresentable) he argues for a reconceptualization of the notions of “uncertainty” and “scientific revolution” that are common terms in the literature on this subject.

He is currently working on an analysis of climate records (specifically, deep-sea sediment cores) and their operative role as data repositories in constraining numerical experiments of paleoclimate reconstructions. By discussing an exemplary simulation of a possible pre-Quaternary analogue to current climatic change (the PETM) he is investigating the modes of representation, time evolution, and non-linearity in modeling a climate history of the Earth.