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My research experience over the last 25 years has been concentrated on the field of the history of knowledge, with approaches from the history of ideas and the perspective of Atlantic history, and a particular emphasis on exploration voyages, cultural transfers and intellectual networks as well as transnational scientific collaboration in the nineteenth century. It describes different layers of interconnection and interactions between Europe and America during the nineteenth century, an important period in the modernization of science, on an institutional, ideological, and individual level. 

I started my academic training in Germany, where I first studied Social Pedagogy in Darmstadt, followed by Sociology and Anthropology in Heidelberg. In order to obtain a broader view of my fields, I spent one year at the Universidad Pontifícia de Salamanca in Madrid, Spain, and another year at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. In 2004 I completed my PhD at the University of Heidelberg, with a dissertation on Alexander von Humboldt´s connection to Spain and on the reception of his work in Spanish scholarly, intellectual and political circles.

From 2000-2016 I worked at the Institute of History at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. During this time I have published widely in Spain, Germany, France and the United States. My first book on Humboldt and Spain was a natural continuation of my dissertation. It was published in Germany in 2006 and in modified Spanish version in 2009. I published a second book in collaboration on Humboldt’s connection to Spanish science in 2007 and prepared critical editions of two of Humboldt’s classic works in Spanish: Views of Nature (2003) and Views of the Cordilleras (2010), before I edited the only complete translation of his final work Cosmos in 2011. I have also prepared Spanish editions of the publications of two other German travellers in Spain, Heinrich Friedrich Link (2011) and Christian August Fischer (2013) and of Fritz Müller’s early contribution to Darwin and evolutionism in Brazil (2020). In 2014 I published my analysis of the relationship and intellectual exchange between Humboldt and the American president Thomas Jefferson, which recently appeared in its Spanish edition (2019).

Over those years, I was closely involved in various outreach activities such as the preparation of several international exhibitions, including their respective exhibition catalogues, and lectures and articles addressed to a more general audience, on important naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt, José Celestino Mutis, Charles Darwin, and the German-Spanish academic networks in the nineteenth and twentieth century. From 2008-2013 I was a participant of the “Malaspina 2010” expedition, an ambitious international and interdisciplinary oceanographic project with over 400 researchers, led by the Spanish CSIC, which included a scientific expedition around the world. Also in the context of this project, I have dedicated considerable effort to science communication, from travelling exhibitions for the research vessels to the preparation of an International Exposition, from organizing guided tours on board to lectures in different place along the itinerary of the expedition.

In October 2013 I began a 3-year Marie Curie Fellowship awarded by the European Commission Research Executive Agency at the Huntington Library in Southern California, with a research project on “Alexander von Humboldt and the Globalization of Science: Networks of knowledge between Germany and the United States in the 19th century.” Aware of the crucial importance and relevance even today of the networks of knowledge established by Humboldt, and inspired by important projects in the field of social network analysis I have begun to apply the theories of this methodological approach to my field. This has proved to reveal hidden structures and patterns of interaction that, though not apparent at first sight, may nevertheless be crucial to understand the underlying dynamics of a complex system. The outcome of this project has led to the preparation of two monographs: Humboldt’s Empire of Knowledge: From the Spanish Royal Court to the White House, analyzes Humboldt’s quest for knowledge in a world of political navigation between the Spanish empire in decline and the expanding United States (in press, 2024) and Expanding the Frontiers of American Science: Humboldt's Networks of Knowledge, which focuses on the impact of Humboldtian Science on the launching of modern American sciences.

This research project has also introduced me to the fascinating field of the scientific exploration of the American West during the nineteenth century, starting in 1804 with the Lewis and Clark expedition, up to the era of the Great Surveys of the West. I am particularly interested in the different aspects of Humboldt’s impact on this process as well as the contribution of other European explorers, naturalists, artists and cartographers, and plan to continue my work along these lines.

Since October 2016 I have been working as an independent researcher, academic writer, speaker, science communicator and scientific consultant. In 2018/2019 I collaborated with the German Institute on Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA) as a Humboldt expert in the frame of their “Culture and Foreign Policy” programme, in which scholars carry out research on topics related to international cultural relations and formulate policy recommendations for external cultural policy strategies. From 2021-2023 I have been a visiting scholar at the University of California in San Diego, in the History Department. Since 2022 I am a senior fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies, a think tank located at the University of California San Diego and, additionally, a research associate at the history department at the University of San Diego.