Visiting Scholars
Rebecca Close works at the intersection of science and technology studies and art.
Their doctoral thesis on ‘the fixed capital of fertility’ situated emergent computational and software landscapes of assisted reproduction in Europe in a broader history of reproductive technologies and politics since the 1970s, and was awarded the 2024 Doctoral Thesis Award by the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University. They were a 2022 Visiting Scholar at ReproSoc, Cambridge University. Their arts criticism and curatorial projects previously focused on HIV/AIDS-related video art in the UK, publishing Revisiting the AIDS-related work of Pratibha Parmar (2017) and curating “Notes on Visual Justice” (LGBT Centre, Barcelona, 2020).
They are currently leading the project Imaging/Imagining Reproductive Crisis: time-lapse microscopy, animation and fertility discourse , which forms part of the MSCA DOROTHY post-doctoral fellowship on the topic of ‘public health crisis’. A recent article The Fertility Fix was published in The New Bioethics.
Read more about their work: https://rebeccaclose.net
Santiago Gorostiza is an environmental historian working at the intersection of political ecology and the history of science. Since 2019, he has served as the Spanish representative to the European Society of Environmental History.
The Spanish Civil War and postwar have been the key focus of his research, with special attention to anarchist collectivisations of water and land, on the one hand, and the autarkic projects of the Franco dictatorship, on the other. He continues investigating the fortification of the Pyrenean border and guerrilla warfare in postwar Spain.
The production of knowledge about climate and the environment is a more recent research interest. Santiago has studied responses to drought during the 17th century, including the writing of a manuscript on urban water supply for the city of Barcelona, known as Llibre de les Fonts (1650). Other examples include scientific and political debates about river sediment transport since the 19th century or controversies about the relation between potash mining and river salinisation from the 1920s to the present day.
Santiago completed his PhD at the Centro de Estudos Sociais of the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) as a Marie Curie ITN fellow. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and at the Centre for History at Sciences Po (Paris), where he was part of the Shifting Shores project and remains an affiliated researcher. At the Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Santiago worked on the ERC-funded project “CLIMASAT: Remote-sensing Satellite Data and the Making of Global Climate in Europe, 1980s-2000s” until March 2025..
Vincenzo Politi is a philosopher of science. His main research areas are: the History and Philosophy of science, with a particular focus on scientific change, scientific progress, and the social, practical, and political dimension of science. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Science in 2015 from the University of Bristol (UK), where he pursued his research with the support of the prestigious Darwin Trust of Edinburgh for Philosophy of Science. He is currently a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow at iHC-UAB (2022-2025).
Before joining iHC, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM (Mexico City, 2017-2018); at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (Paris, France, 2018-2019), where he collaborated to the EU Horizon2020 project "Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice" (RRI-Practice); at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Lyon 3 (Lyon, France, 2019), for the nationally funded project PartiSCiP (“Citizen science: new epistemological perspectives on scientific objectivity”); at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway, 2020-2022) where he worked on the RRI aspects of PINpOINT, an interdisciplinary research project on precision oncology.
He has published original research articles in international peer-reviewed philosophy journals such as Synthese, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Theoria, Journal for the General Philosophy of Science, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. In 2019, he was the guest editor of “Questions about Science”, a special issue of the journal Theoria.
Laura Valls Plana was postdoctoral fellow thanks to a Margarita Salas Grant · 3 years for the training of young doctors, which will take place during a two-year research stay at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (MNHN-EHESS-CNRS) in Paris and a third year at the IHC-UAB. She will pursue her research on the urban cultures of natural history at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this case, with a special emphasis on the concept and material culture of "animal skins" and the circulation of knowledge, objects and actors between Paris and Barcelona. The aim is to analyze the change in the public presentation of animals in natural history museums in relation to a broader urban culture of transformation, circulation and consumption of "animal skins" in the European context.
In 2019, she has defended the thesis “Civic nature. Science, territory and city in the park of the Citadel of Barcelona” in which she studied this urban space as a privileged place in the configuration of the conceptions of the nature and of a certain style of divulging of the natural sciences. Special Award Doctorate, academic year 2019/2020.
In the professional field she has had a long career in the field of scientific culture. It should be noted that she has worked for thirteen years in the CSIC Delegation in Catalonia, coordinating various outreach projects with a complex focus, combining interdisciplinarity, digital and face-to-face media, innovative and traditional formats, current issues and reflective content. It is also worth mentioning that she is currently participating in the curation of the new permanent exhibition of the Museu Martorell (the historical headquarters of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, MCNB) on the global/local history of the natural history museums, with Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC) and the MCNB team. [Opening: 2023]