Dr Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh

College positions: Fellow Commoner

Subject: History

Dr Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is a Fellow Commoner at Magdalene.

Dr Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is an Assistant Professor in Colonial Environmental History and Decolonial Futures at the University of Amsterdam. As a global historian of science, his research seeks to understand how the interaction of different cultures of knowledge produced new sciences that circulated across the world in the early modern period. He is particularly interested in how long-distance corporations, such as the Society of Jesus and the Dutch East India Company, appropriated and globalised diverse, local non-European understandings of the natural world.

His first book project, The Tartar Moment: Crises and the Globalization of Chinese Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press. It explores how the Manchu conquest of Ming China during the “Little Ice Age” reshaped the intellectual history of environmental and political thought in early modern Europe. The book highlights the pivotal role of the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini in translating Chinese cultures of crisis for European audiences. Contributing to contemporary debates in the history of science, The Tartar Moment contends that catastrophic times and uncertainty about the future created fruitful conditions for cross-cultural epistemic exchanges. The book thus advocates an urgent rethinking of the nature of cross-cultural encounters in the history of science, emphasising the importance of crises as generators of new, braided cultures of knowledge.

He was trained in Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he specialised in the History and Philosophy of Science and was awarded the Jacob Bronowski Prize in 2018. Subsequently, he read for an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In 2023, he was awarded his PhD, titled Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian Exchanges, and the Early Modern Sciences, by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and St Edmunds College, Cambridge. This work was supported by a Freer Prize Fellowship of the Royal Institution. During his PhD, he held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Descartes Centre in Utrecht. He also spent a month working at the Royal Society Library in London, supported by a Lisa Jardine Award. After his doctorate, he was elected the Lumley Junior Research Fellow in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge and was awarded an Early Career Fellowship Grant by the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust, hosted in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.

He is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Affiliated Scholar of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and a Fellow-Commoner at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In both 2023 and 2024, he was shortlisted for the BBC New Generation Thinker Award. His PhD was awarded the 8th Dissertation Prize (2025) of the Division for the History of Science and Technology (DHST) in the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST) and the Coventry-Emsley Prize of St Edmund's College, Cambridge, for the most outstanding PhD in Classics, History, Philosophy or Theology. He also received a special mention in the Premio Giovani (Early Career Prize) 2024 from the Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza (Italian Society for the History of Science) for his article "Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History", published in the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Research Interests

  • global history
  • cross-cultural exchanges
  • environmental history
  • colonial history
  • South African history
  • Jesuits in China
  • history of knowledg
  • history of science

Qualifications

  • BA (Cantab) 2018
  • MPhil (Cantab) 2019
  • MA (Cantab) 2023
  • PhD (Cantab) 2024

Career/Research Highlights

Professional Affiliations

  • Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  • Member of the British Society for the History of Science
  • Member of the History of Science Society
  • Member of European Society for the History of Science
  • Member of the Belgian-Dutch Society for the History of Science
  • Member of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society

KEY PUBLICATIONS

Colonial World Making and Global Knowledges at the Early Modern Cape of Good Hope. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Past & Present (2025). Advance online publication.

Written in the Stars: How Old is China?. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. History Today 75(10) (2025), pp. 54–65.

Wild horses: Tartar warfare and the history of civilization. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Annals of Science 82(3) (2025), pp. 381–406.

Chinese Heavens in European Literatures, c. 1650 1700. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. In A. Heydenreich et al. (Eds.), Writing the Heavens: Celestial Observation in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, pp. 225–243. De Gruyter (2025).

Interesting and Uninteresting Unknowns: Mapping Southern Africa in the Seventeenth Century. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Journal for the History of Knowledge (2024), pp. 83–108.

Oriental Chronology: Chinese Astronomy and the Politics of Antiquity in Eighteenth Century Britain. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Isis (2024), pp. 720–737.

Crises and the history of science: a materialist rehabilitation. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh and Rory Kent. BJHS Themes (2024), pp. 39–57.

Global History of Science. James Poskett and Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. In Lukas M. Verburgt (Ed.), Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science, pp. 17–42. Bloomsbury Academic (2024).

Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Journal of the History of Ideas (2023), pp. 487–510.

Racial Capitalism in Voltaire's Enlightenment. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. History Workshop Journal 94 (2022), pp. 22–41.

Rethinking the Rites Controversy: Kilian Stumpf’s Acta Pekinensia and the Historical Dimensions of a Religious Quarrel. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Modern Intellectual History (2022), pp. 29–53.

Galenizing the New World: Joseph François Lafitau's Galenization of Canadian Ginseng, CA 1716–1724. Gianamar Giovannetti Singh. Notes and Records (2021), pp. 59–72.

Email
gg410@cam.ac.uk