Agustí Nieto-Galan is Full Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), ICREA Acadèmia Fellow (2009 & 2018), and director of the Institute d'Història de la Ciència (iHC) at the UAB. Following degrees in both chemistry (URL) and history (UB), he took his PhD in the History of Science at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and held postdoctoral positions in the Modern History Faculty, University of Oxford, and the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie/ CNRS, Paris. He has written widely on the history of chemistry and natural dyestuffs, the history of the popularization of science (18th-20th centuries), and the relation between science and power in the twentieth century. Among his last books it is worth mentioning: The Politics of Chemistry (Cambridge, 2019), Tóxicos invisibles (Icaria, 2020) and The Land of the Hunger Artists (Cambridge, 2023, forthcoming).

Research interests

Dr. Nieto-Galan analyses several historical cases in which science played a key role in the public sphere. As a continuation of his work on science popularization, he develops the "hunger artists" project as an example of intersection between science and spectacle in the late nineteenth century at a global scale.

He also explores the role of science popularization in non-democratic societies such as Franco's dictatorship and its funtction as diplomatic tool in international organizations. He is now editing a collective volume on the role of science popularization at UNESCO in the 1950s.

His analysis of the relation of science and power in the 20th century - in particular, chemistry- has led him to work on toxic products as relevant sociotechnical agents, and on the experts' practices of invisibilization of pollution and risk (agnotology) from a political perspective. He is also working on a biography of chemist and science popularizer Miquel Masriera.

Keywords

History of Science, History of Chemistry, Science Popularization, Urban History of Science, Science and Power, Science Diplomacy