• Global and transimperial histories of science and technology
• Climate change adaptation
• Local and indigenous knowledge systems
• The Green Revolution
• International development
• History of fascism

Current project

Droughtscapes of Empire: Food Production and the Techno-Politics of Dryland Adaptation, 1890s-1940s 
(SNSF Ambizione, March 2026 – February 2030)

Drought is not simply a natural fact – it is a political, economic, and technological problem. This project examines how capitalist food regimes confronted the challenge of feeding empires and global markets from semiarid environments, at a time when large-scale irrigation was often too costly, technically demanding, or simply unavailable.

Between the 1890s and the post-World War II decades, four dryland frontiers — Australia’s New South Wales, French Algeria and Tunisia, South Africa’s Transvaal, and the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle — were transformed into major producers of staple crops and livestock feed. While irrigation played a role, this transformation rested above all on the techno-politics of dryland adaptation — the development and spread of farming technologies suited to scarce and erratic rainfall. The project calls this logic xero-capitalism: where hydro-capitalism sought to reengineer semiarid environments through large-scale hydraulic infrastructure, xero-capitalism reconfigured their dryness as an economic and political resource.

The result was the making of droughtscapes — modern agrarian environments where modern food production could coexist with climatic uncertainty. Two technological domains were central to this process: biotechnology, especially drought-resistant cereal crops, and water conservation techniques such as dry-farming tillage, crop rotations, and soil management practices. Rather than developing in isolation, these technologies circulated across a transimperial network connecting the four regions and beyond. A critical dimension of this circulation was the systematic appropriation of climate-resilient indigenous knowledge and crop diversity, which scientists and settlers co-opted as raw material for dryland adaptation.

This history speaks directly to the present. Since the mid-twentieth century, capitalist food regimes have developed an ever-greater thirst for water, driving a dramatic escalation in the exploitation of aquifers, rivers, and lakes. Climate change is now forcing a reckoning with this water-intensive paradigm. By tracing the tensions between monoculture and diversification, techno-fixes and agroecology, productivity and food security that ran through the history of droughtscapes, the project contributes historical depth to contemporary debates on green capitalism and climate adaptation, challenging the continued faith in techno-fixes for feeding our drying world. 

Past projects

• The Global Battle of Wheat: Transnational Seed Networks in the Fascist Green Revolution (SNSF Postdoc Mobility: Return Grant, 2024-25)

• The Global Battle of Wheat: Mobilizing Science for Agrarian Development in Fascist Italy (1920s-1940s) (SNSF Postdoc Mobility, 2022-24)

• The Thin Green Line: A History of Agrarian Development in Ethiopia from Fascist Colonialism to International Aid, 1936-1957 (Dissertation & Book Project)

Academic positions

Education

Awards

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
 

Book Chapters