I am a PhD student in the History of Science, based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. My doctoral project explores the science of snowflakes from the early-17th to mid-20th centuries. I am particularly focusing on practices of observation and visualisation, and how these related to different environments in which snowflakes were studied. This project is designed to shed light on the value of studying snowflakes to scientists, how and where they have been observed and pictured, and what we can learn from this history with respect to the study of nature. The project is being carried out as part of the international doctoral programme ‘Rethinking Environment: The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society‘, run jointly by the Environmental Science Center WZU (Augsburg) and the Rachel Carson Center.

As a historian of science I am chiefly interested in histories of the physical and earth sciences, including their material and visual cultures. I am also broadly interested in the way these histories relate to contemporary debates about climate science and geoengineering. My previous work has focused on episodes in the history of 18th-century Dutch science, including the meaning of “useful” science and the emergence of electrotherapeutic theory and practice.