Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach is a historian of environmental history, specialising in the modern life sciences, particularly evolutionary theory and ecology. Her research focuses on the history of science and the environment at the intersection of indigenous knowledge, conservation science, environmental law, and the climate crisis in Madagascar; molecular biology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology governance; museums, natural history collections, and intellectual property; scientific diplomacy and science communication; gender and science. She is also interested in writing and questions of formal expression and the politics of historical production.

Nuala Caomhánach is currently at work on a book project, “Curating Madagascar: The Rise of Phylogenetics in an Age of Climate Crisis, 1921–2025”. It tells the unknown global story of how botanists and plant scientists collected, studied, interpreted, molecularised, and aimed to conserve the island’s diverse ecosystems in the face of increasing environmental destruction and development projects. Madagascar’s long history, as a site of botanical research, allows her to highlight how changing scientific practices have generated novel legal and social challenges in conservation policy with far-reaching ramifications.

Her second book project, “The Tree Builders”, is an ethnographically informed history into the world(s) of plant scientists who reconstruct the evolutionary histories of extant and extinct plant species using genetics. Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, it examines how plant phylogeneticists have conceived of, conceptualised, and delineated biological and evolutionary time. This project demonstrates how the history of biotechnology and the molecularisation of the natural world cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy.
 

This article was published in Globe #36, the Graduate Institute Review.