Bio:
I am an associate professor of History at Drexel University, co-editor of the journal History and Technology, and a member of the new Cambridge History of Technology editorial team. My book Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016) was awarded the Pfizer Prize for the best scholarly book in 2017, the History of Science Society's highest honor for a work of scholarship.
As a historian of science and technology, I examine the connections between science, technology, crops, and politics on a global scale. For instance, after revisiting the history of European fascism through stories of technoscientific organisms such as wheat, pigs, and sheep, I am now studying the significance of cloning Californian oranges for the history of racial capitalism in the United States, South Africa, Algeria, Palestine, and Brazil.
I have served as a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, a visiting professor at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and a member of the research team Moving Crops at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).
I recently co-edited Nature Remade (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Capital Científica (Imprensa Ciências Sociais, 2019). In addition, I am co-author of Inventing a European Nation (2021) and Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023).
Selected Publications:
Books
Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscienctific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016).
Tiago Saraiva (2013), “Breeding Europe: Crop Diversity, Gene Banks, and Commoners,” in Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis (eds.), Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press): 185-212.
Tiago Saraiva, “The Production/Circulation of Standardized Karakul Sheep and Frontier Settlement in the Empires of Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar,” in Dolly Jørgensen, Sara Pitchard, and Finn Arne Jørgensen (eds.), New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013): 135-150.
Refereed Articles
Tiago Saraiva, “Fascist Modernist Landscapes: Wheat, Dams, and Forests, and the Making of the Portuguese New State,” Environmental History, 21.1, (2016): 55-71.
Tiago Saraiva, “Oranges as Model Organisms for Historians”, Agricultural History, 88.3 (2014): 410-16.
Tiago Saraiva, “The History of Cybernetics in McOndo”, History and Technology, 28.4 (2012): 413-420.
Tiago Saraiva and M. Norton Wise (eds.), “Autarky/Autarchy: Genetics and the Political Economy of Fascism”, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 40, n. 4 (2010): 419-428.
Tiago Saraiva, “Fascist Labscapes: Genetics, Wheat and the Landscapes of Fascism in Italy and Portugal”, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 40, n. 4 (2010): 457-498.
Tiago Saraiva (2007), “Inventing the Technological Nation: the Example of Portugal (1851-1898)”, History and Technology, 23 (3): 263-273.
Tiago Saraiva with Antonio Lafuente (2004), “The Urban Scale of Science and the Enlargement of Madrid”, Social Studies of Science, 34: 531-569.