Maria do Mar Gago
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Biography
Maria do Mar Gago is a historian of science and technology interested in the global history of crops, notably coffee. She was trained as a biologist but from early on realised that she could not make sense of the contemporary practice of science without studying its history.
From 2020 to 2022 she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral dissertation, ‘Robusta Empire: Coffee, Scientists and the Making of Colonial Angola (1898-1961).’ In this work, she brings together the history of science and technology, environmental history, and imperial history to produce a nuanced narrative of Robusta coffee and Portuguese colonialism in Angola.
Gago’s current project further explores the ways coffee and scientists shaped the social and political order, but this time from a transnational perspective beyond the Portuguese case. By taking coffee collections as forms of geopower, the project discusses the role of scientists in weaving international, national and colonial agendas, and also the ways coffee plants themselves shaped those agendas. Her previous interests include the relationship between science and the authoritarian regime of António Salazar.
Research fields
- History
Selected publications
- Gago, Maria, “Moving Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961,” in Knowledge Flows in a Global Age. A Transnational Approach, edited by John Krige, 231-252. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. [link]
- Gago, Maria do Mar, “Logística e agronomia: imperialismo português, hegemonia norte-americana e a coprodução do café angolano (1945-1956),” in A produção do mundo. Problemas logísticos e sítios críticos, organised by Andrea Pavoni and Franco Tomassoni, 299-317. Lisbon: Livros Outro Modo, 2022. [link]
- Gago, Maria do Mar, “How green was Portuguese colonialism? Agronomists and coffee in interwar Angola,” in Changing Societies: Legacies and Challenges, vol.III. The diverse worlds of sustainability, edited by Ana Delicado, Nuno Domingos and Luís de Sousa, 229-246. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2018. [link]🔓
- Gago, Maria do Mar. “Things of Darkness: Genetics, Melanins and the Regime of Salazar (1936–1952),” Centaurus 57 (2015): 1-27. [link]
Main projects
- Individual project “Making Coffee Global: World Collections, African Forests and Geopower (1933-1961)” — Hosted by the IHC and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (2020.03783.CEECIND). 2021-2027
- “Robusta empire : coffee, scientists and the making of colonial Angola (1898-1961)” — Individual PhD project hosted by the University of Lisbon, supervised by Tiago Saraiva (ICS — University of Lisbon) and Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge), and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology.
- Researcher in the team of the exhibition “Darwin’s Evolution” — Coordinated by José Feijó and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Foundation for Science and Technology. 2009
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julho, 2024
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![Illustrative banner for the lecture “Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop”. With Lavinia Maddaluno, from Università Ca’ Foscari , IHC Visting Scholar 2024. The poster includes a photo of Lavinia Maddaluno.](https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-07-16_Lavinia-Maddaluno_1200x500.jpg)
Detalhes do Evento
Lecture with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy.
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Detalhes do Evento
Lecture with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy.
Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop
A dietary mainstay in non-European societies and a cornerstone of dishes like Northern Italian risotto, rice has diverse culinary significance. However, the timing of its introduction to Northern Italy remains unclear. Examining this event offers insights into the process of integrating new crops into both diet and cultural imagination. This talk is about the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Bringing together the history of knowledge and environmental history, in this talk I will reflect on how rice was appropriated by several actors, and on how these appropriations were intertwined with perceptions and constructions of the landscape and material environment. By interlacing narratives of rice cultivation and of the landscapes rice forms, alongside discussions of infrastructural development and knowledge systems, I will also delineate the progression of interactions between humans and their environments, as well as the evolution of water management practices, scientific advancements, medical understandings, and political-economic ideologies across different historical periods. Additionally, the talk will highlight how resources were conceptualized in the early modern period, reconnecting to contemporary debates on the Anthropocene and on the agency of non-humans.
About IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar:
Lavinia Maddaluno is Assistant Professor in early modern history at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, working on David Gentilcore’s ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900. She is a historian of science interested in exploring the nexus between humans, nature and economy in early modern Europe. Lavinia has just completed her first monograph Science and political Economy in Enlightenment Milan (1760-1805), forthcoming with the Voltaire Foundation in autumn 2024. She is currently editing a book on rice in the Mediterranean with Rachele Scuro and a special issue on Water Knowledge with Giacomo Savani and Davide Martino. Lavinia has held multiple fellowships since the end of her PhD (Cambridge UK, 2018), from a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome, to a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI and a joint Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship in the History of Science. More recently, she has been Fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Fondazione Einaudi, working on a new project on rice-related knowledge networks between France and Italy in the Enlightenment.
Attendance is free.
Tempo
(Terça-feira) 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Organizador
Institute of Contemporary History — NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanitiescomunicacao.ihc@fcsh.unl.pt Avenida de Berna, 26C - 1069-061 Lisbon
News
Third IHC Summer School in Évora
Jul 15, 2024
The IHC Summer School will return to the University of Évora for its third edition
Lavinia Maddaluno is IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar
Jul 11, 2024
The historian of science will be the fourth IHC Visiting Scholar
Quintino Lopes visits Salvador, Bahia
Jul 9, 2024
Quintino Lopes visited the building that housed the former Phonetics Laboratory of the Federal University of Bahia
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