Chercheur postdoctorant – Boursier Wiener-Anspach
davide.martino@ulb.be

Université libre de Bruxelles
Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences sociales
Campus du Solbosch - CP 133/01
Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50
1050 Bruxelles

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Biographie

As a postdoctoral researcher at the ULB, I work on a project entitled “Land of Water: constructing the hydraulic environment in colonial Suriname, c. 1650–1850”. My research is generously funded by a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellowship. Prior to joining the ULB, I worked as Postdoc in architectural history at the Universität Bern (Switzerland). I hold a PhD in History (2023) from St John’s College, University of Cambridge (UK), where I also completed an MPhil in Early Modern History (2017) and a BA in History (2016). From 2017 to 2019 I worked as a teacher in a British state primary school, and I remain passionate about the role of education in society.


Présentation des recherches

My research project, “Land of Water: constructing the hydraulic environment in colonial Suriname, c. 1650–1850”, draws on the insights of environmental history to understand how local environments in the Dutch colony of Suriname were constructed by human and more-than-human agents. Following the lead of historians of technology and architecture, it focuses on the built environment—particularly the colony’s hydraulic infrastructure—as a palimpsest of past practices, technologies, and values. Combining the lenses of these two historical disciplines, “Land of Water” sheds new light on an understudied part of the Dutch colonial empire, and contributes to current debates about the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and the extraction of natural resources.
Water was already a central concern of my PhD, for which I focused on early modern European cities. Taking Augsburg, Florence, and Amsterdam as case-studies, I researched the work of hydraulic experts at the terraqueous interface between cities and their waters. Their interventions in the liquid environment are one source of our present relationship with (urban) waters, and will be the focus of my first book.


Domaines de recherche

  • Environmental history, water history
  • Urban and architectural history
  • History of science and technology
  • History of cartography and hydrography
  • Transnational, comparative history

Travaux sélectionnés

  • Forthcoming ‘Mining for water? Underground sources of hydraulic knowledge and expertise in early modern Europe’ in Early Science and Medicine (exp. 2025)
  • 10/2024 ‘The diachronic projection: past and future movements of hydrographic systems on early modern maps’ in Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2024), pp. 118–27.
  • 07/2024 ‘The fountains of the Fugger family’s gardens in sixteenth-century Augsburg’ in Garden History 51:1 (summer 2024), pp. 3–25. Gardens’ Trust 2023 prize: highly commended. https://doi.org/10.48350/198391.
  • 06/2024 ‘Liquid streets: early modern waterways in urban spaces’ in M.J. Moreira da Rocha & N. Reisende (eds), História da Arquitetura. Perspetivas Temáticas (III). A Rua na Estrutura Urbana (Porto: CITCEM, 2024), pp. 157–66. https://doi.org/10.48350/198897. Featured in Le Temps.
  • 08/2023 with M. Boom (eds), Fickle waters, resilient societies? A roundtable on resilience, sustainability and water history around the North Sea [roundtable discussion]. https://www.academia.edu/105948829.
  • 03/2022 ‘Neptun und der Lech: flüssige Grenzen und ihr instabiles Gleichgewicht im frühneuzeitlichen Augsburg’ in Mitteilungen des Instituts für Europäische Kulturgeschichte 27 (2022), pp. 11–32. urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-opus4-955368.
  • 12/2021 ‘The Veneto: crossroads between Germany and Italy / Il Veneto, crocevia fra Germania e Italia’ in D. Howard (ed.), Proto-industrial architecture of the Veneto in the age of Palladio / Architettura proto-industriale del Veneto nell’ età di Palladio (Vicenza: CISA A. Palladio & Roma: Officina Libraria, 2021), pp. 93–103. Book won 2023 European Heritage / Europa Nostra Award.
  • 06/2020 ‘The 1618 reconstruction plan of the Weimar Residenzschloss by Costantino de’ Servi’ in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 83:2 (June 2020), pp. 213–35. https://doi.org/10.1515/ZKG-2020-2003. Featured in La Nazione.