Profil
 

PhD, New York University

Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach is a historian of environmental history, specializing 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.

Current research project(s) and/or publication(s) 
 

She is currently at work on the book project, Curating Madagascar: The Rise of Phylogenetics in an Age of Climate Crisis, 1921-2025. Curating Madagascar tells the unknown global story of how botanists and plant scientists collected, studied, interpreted, molecularized, 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 Caomhánach 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. This historical project, focuses on the period between the 1970s and the present, examining how plant phylogeneticists have conceived of, conceptualised, and delineated biological and evolutionary time. This project demonstrates how the history of biotechnology and the molecularization of the natural world cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy.

Selected publications
 

• “‘Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again’: Female evolutionary biology theorists as scientific rebels and oppositional scientists,'' in Negotiating In/visibility: Women, Science, Engineering and Medicine in the Twentieth Century, eds. Irina Matei and Amelia Sorela Bonea, (Manchester University Press, 2025).
• “Building An Inclusive Botany: The “Radicle” Dream,” with Mackenzie Mabry, R. Shawn Abrahams, Shelly Gaynor, Kasey Pham, Tanisha Williams, Kathleen S. Murphy, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Douglas E Soltis, and Pamela S. Soltis, Plants, People, Planet, January 2024.
• “Methodological Approaches for the Life Sciences and Intellectual History,” with Sébastien Lemerle, in The Routledge Handbook on Intellectual History and the Sociology of Ideas, eds. Stefanos Geroulanos and Gisèle Sapiro, (Routledge, 2024).
• “Digitizing Death: The Botanical Collections of Madagascar and the Race to Document Life,” NiCHE blog, May 2023.
• “Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience Exhibition,” The LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden, February 2020. Creator and Lead Curator. Exhibition Library Research Guide.