Lino Camprubi

Lino Camprubi
Résidents Labex RFIEA+
pas Eurias
pas FIAS

dates de séjour

01/09/2021 - 30/11/2021

discipline

Histoire des sciences et des technologies
Interdisciplinaire

Fonction d’origine

Chercheur

Institution d’origine

University of Sevilla

pays d'origine

Espagne

projet de recherche

Visual representations of the 3D Mediterranean (past-present-future)

In the next 20 years Turkey will double its submarine fleet. According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the goal is protecting research in what Turkey considers to be its continental shelf. The conflict between Greece and Turkey over territorial waters is very old, but it owes its present form to the historical introduction of submarine warfare and underwater oil and gas exploration. And yet, we still lack an account of how humans gained access to and engaged with depth and volume in the Mediterranean Sea. Other examples of the centrality of depth are climate change and marine environmental degradation.

 

To think about the future of the Mediterranean in a holistic manner requires coming to terms with its three dimensions. This Project explores the multiple and heterogeneous efforts to visualize the Mediterranean Sea as a three-dimensional space. Starting with early maps of reefs and other shallow accidents, it interrogates how visualizations of the ocean’s bathymetry and column of water acquired depth from the 19th century onwards, including very recent images coming from the ocean, climate, and environmental sciences, human geography and even history and the arts.

 

The project is inherently interdisciplinary and transnational. It seizes the opportunity provided by the common interest in historical series (and their visualization) as a way to learn about the future, shared by the earth and environmental sciences as well as by the humanities. The project’s focus is on visual representations, on the place of (both pictorial and non-pictorial) images in scientific and cultural constructions of the Mediterranean Sea. I seek to identify what sorts of visualizations are missing and, most importantly, what do volumetric images tell us about the possibilities open for a future Mediterranean.

biographie

Lino Camprubi is an historian of science with broad interdisciplinary interests and a focus on scientific understandings of the Mediterranean Sea. He is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at University of Sevilla’s philosophy department. My work combines history and philosophy of science and technology with political economy, environmental history, and diplomatic history.

 

After pursuing graduate studies in philosophy in Sevilla and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell, he obtained my PhD in History in University of California, LA. He has worked at the Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, University of Chicago, and the Max Planck History for the History of Science.

 

Following that path, he is a co-PI for the (Spanish Ministry) IBER@ Project on tacit knowledge and navigation in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from the early modern period. He is also a member of the H2020 SALTGIANT, a consortium of geologists and human scientists from 11 European universities studying the formation and discovery of the Mediterranean salt giant.

 

He has published (both academic and popular dissemination papers) on Spanish history (Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, MIT Press, 2014), Western Saharan geopolitics, and on Gibraltar science and strategy. In 2014 I started a long-term project on the Mediterranean, which is laid out in a paper he recently published in Diplomatic History (2020).

 

Titulaire de la chaire Germain Tillion.