Tiago Figueiredo Saraiva (Lisbon, 1972) holds EOI’s Professorial Chair in Humanism and Technology.
Since 2005 he is also Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. He holds a PhD by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with a History of Science thesis on ‘The Urban Scale of Science’. The research was developed at the History of Science Department of the Institute of History at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. He also has a degree in Materials Engineering from the Superior Technical Institute of the Technical University of Lisbon. In 2004-2005 he held a post doc scholarship granted by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology which supported his research on ‘The Mobilization of Science in Portugal (1929-1974)’ conducted in the New University of Lisbon and in the History Department of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2007/2008 he was Visiting Professor at UCLA in a joint appointment at the Center for Society and Genetics and at the History Department, being responsible for two undergraduate courses: “From Mendel to Monsanto: Genetics, Environment and Landscapes”; “Sciences and the State(s) in the Twentieth Century”.
Tiago has published the books Ciencia y ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa (1851-1900) (2005) and Cidade e cidadanía (2008), as well as numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
He is an active member of both the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the History of Science Society (HSS). In 2005/2006 he was nominated International Scholar of SHOT, and he is currently member of the Program Committee of SHOT’s Annual Meeting serving as its chairman for the year 2009.
He is currently the PI of the Project “Spaces of Portuguese Technoscience (1850-1950)”, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and bringing together the main centers of research in History of Science in the country. He is also part of the European project “Eurocommons” integrated in the international research network Tensions of Europe, funded by the European Science Foundation, aiming at producing an alternative history of European integration based on technology.
He is the editor in chief of HoST, journal of History of Science and Technology (www.johost.eu) and he is member of the editorial board of the journal History and Technology.
Presently, most of his research deals with the connections between Science and Fascism. He is interested in understanding how scientific artifacts are constitutive elements of the fascist regimes in Portugal, Italy and Germany. He follows the work of plant and animal geneticists in making wheat, potatoes or pigs into scientific objects able to contribute to the political economy of the new regimes, namely their food policies. He combines the typical history of science approach of looking into laboratory interiors with the broader concerns of environmental history and its interest for the effects of scientific activities in the landscape. His research also builds on the current proposals by Science Studies scholars of taking non-human animals and plants as major historical actors. This work is the basis for his forthcoming book, “Fascist Pigs: Genetics, Food and Fascism in Europe”.
He keeps his previous interest on the urban dynamics of science aiming at producing a history of urban sprawl in the twentieth century narrated from a history of technology perspective. He now takes the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and Lisbon as his major case studies.
