Dr Raphael Uchôa

Adrian Research Fellow, Darwin College
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staff member

Raphael Uchôa is the Adrian Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Between 2018 and 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Rausing Fellow at the Department for the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University and held a research position in the Amazon basin at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi.

Uchôa’s work historicizes the geopolitical and epistemological transit of botanical and ethnographical materials from the Amazon basin to Europe between the nineteenth and twenty centuries. His current research examines the colonial encounters between British naturalists and Amerindian populations of the Amazonian Basin, examining broader issues such as relations between western and Amazonian regimes of knowledge, indigenous cosmological constructions, colonialism, as well as the links between natural history, race, anthropology and the 'ethno'-sciences.

Since 2016, he has collaborated with the project “De-centered science: Transits of mining chemistry, medicine and natural history in Europe and Latin America” carried between Centre Simão Mathias Studies for the History of Science (CESIMA) in Brazil, the Department for the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala and the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library in Stockholm.

Currently, Raphael is one of the conveners of the Research Group ‘Science and its Others: Histories of Ethno-Science’ and the reading group ‘Ethno-science’.

Contact

Tags & Themes

Address

Darwin College, Silver Street, Cambridge CB3 9EU

Email
ru224@cantab.ac.uk
Links

Key Publications

Articles: main research papers (peer-reviewed)

  • [forthcoming, Journal of Social Ontology] “Savage knowledge,” ethnosciences, and the colonial ways of producing reservoirs of indigenous epistemologies. 2023.
  • From the State of Nature to the State of Ruins. Annals of Science (2021).
  • Contextualizing the ‘American Man’ in an Atlantic: the case of Carl von Martius and his German and Iberian sources. Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society, (2019): 91-109.
  • Ephraim Chambers and the disciplinary emergence of a ‘science of man’ in the 18th century. Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science, 17 (2016): 80-93.
  • The ‘Essential Antithesis’: T.H. Huxley and humankind’s place in nature. (with S. Waisse) Brazilian Journal for the History of Science, 8 (2015): 51-64.

Book Review

  • [Philosophy of Science]. Eds: Ludwig, David et al. Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, Routledge, 2021. (With Robert A. Wilson, Edwin Etieyibo, Andrew Buskell & Catherine Kendig).
  • Britt Rusert. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences (2018).
  • Banks-Leite and Galvão, orgs., O garoto selvagem e o dr. Jean Itard (Editora Mercado de Letras, 2017) in Bakhtiniana, Revista de Estudos do Discurso vol.13 n.3 (2018).

Book Chapters

  • [forthcoming] Imperial melancholy and the subversion of ruins in the Amazon. In New Earth Histories, University of Chicago Press, Alison Bashford, Adam Bobbette and Emily M. Kern, eds, 2023.
  • (Eu) genética: entre fissuras e continuidades. (with L. Thomaz; R. Cruz and S. Waisse) In História da Ciência: Tópicos Atuais 4, Maria Helena R. Beltran; Fumikazu Saito; Laís dos Santos P. Trindade. (Eds.). São Paulo: Livraria da Física, 2016.
  • Eugenia: ciência de uma época. (with L. Thomaz; R. Cruz and S. Waisse) In História da Ciência: Tópicos Atuais 3, Maria Helena R. Beltran; Fumikazu Saito; Laís dos Santos P. Trindade. (Eds.). São Paulo: Livraria da Física, 2015.

Public Scholarship: