NUNO CASTEL-BRANCO

All Souls College, University of Oxford

I am a historian of early modern culture and science at All Souls College, Oxford University. Last year, I was a fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, also known as Villa I Tatti. I completed my PhD at Johns Hopkins University's History of Science Department in June 2021, where I studied under a Fulbright Schlolarship. After my PhD I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for a year in Berlin, Germany, and a visiting fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University.

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.

I am currently writing a book about the emergence of the new sciences in seventeenth-century Europe through the fascinating career of the anatomist Nicolaus Steno. I am particularly interested in the social and intellectual reasons behind the interaction of mathematics with disciplines such as physics, medicine and theology. For this project I worked in Italy, at Pisa's Scuola Normale Superiore. In Pisa, I was also awarded the Santorio Fellowship for Medical Humanities and Science.

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, 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 science and religion 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!