NUNO CASTEL-BRANCO

All Souls College, University of Oxford

I am a historian of early modern science and culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Previously, I was a research fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, also known as Villa I Tatti (2022/23); and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2021/22). I completed my PhD at Johns Hopkins University’s History of Science Department in June 2021, where I studied under a Fulbright Scholarship.

Before becoming a historian, I also received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Lisbon (ISTecnico), the leading STEM school in Portugal. As a physics graduate student, I studied the accelerated expansion of the universe, whose results were published in the journal Physics Letters B.

My first book, The Traveling Anatomist (Chicago, 2025), is about the emergence of the new sciences in seventeenth-century Europe through the fascinating career of the anatomist Nicolaus Steno. I explore the social and intellectual reasons behind the interaction of mathematics with disciplines such as physics, medicine and theology. For this project I also worked in Italy, at Pisa’s Scuola Normale Superiore. In Pisa, I was also awarded the Santorio Fellowship for Medical Humanities and Science.

I am currently studying the interactions between mathematicians and anatomists in the decades around 1600, including Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, and other lesser known actors. Research for this project has already received the generous support of the Royal Society, the Oxford University’s John Fell Fund, and All Souls College.

I also write about the intersection of science and religion in history and on early modern Iberia. My article “Material Piety: Science and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Portugal”, published in Renaissance Quarterly in 2021, was awarded the Oliveira Marques Prize for Best Article in Portuguese History.

I have given talks on my research in English, Italian, and Portuguese in the United States and various countries in Europe, and I am thankful for funding from institutions such as the Fulbright Program, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, the Max Planck Institute, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Johns Hopkins’ Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, and Italy’s National Institute on Nuclear Physics. I also taught courses in the History of Science and History departments in the United States, Germany, and Portugal. In particular, I developed a course on the Galileo affair, where undergraduates read Galileo’s original editions at the Johns Hopkins Special Collections and performed Galileo’s astronomical observations at the NASA-funded Hopkins telescope.d

If you are interested in my research and career I would love to hear from you! You can also find me on LinkedIn.