Nota biográfica

Raphael Uchôa is a historian of science specialising in the historical geopolitics and circulation of knowledge related to botanical and ethnographic materials from the Amazon basin to the Global North during the modern period. His research examines how these materials, collected in the Amazon by European and US scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intersect with and engage Amerindian systems of knowledge. He has published on these topics, analysing the movement of these materials, the epistemic exchanges they generated, and their broader implications for the history of science, colonial encounters, and decolonial thought. He is currently finalising a book that builds on these themes, integrating historical analysis with interdisciplinary perspectives. Raphael previously held the Adrian Research Fellowship at Darwin College, University of Cambridge, where he convened the research group Science and its Others: Histories of Ethno-Science. From 2019 to 2023, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge, focusing on non-Western histories of science. He has also served as a Postdoctoral Hans Rausing Fellow at the Office for History of Science, Uppsala University. He is currently an associate researcher with the ECO Amazônia project at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. His work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning the history of science, archaeology, anthropology, and museology. His research experience includes extensive fieldwork at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in the Amazon, as well as archival research across Europe and the United States. Beyond academia, Raphael is also a screenwriter and has contributed to documentaries examining the history, resource extraction, and cultural significance of the Amazon. His most recent project (https://vimeo.com/960547515), which investigates the intersections of science, museums, and resource extraction in the Amazon, has received multiple awards for Best Environmental Documentary.