About me

I am Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (he/him), an Assistant Professor in Colonial Environmental History and Decolonial Futures at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, I was the Lumley Junior Research Fellow in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. 

My current research aims to examine how early modern Europeans drew on their knowledge of East Asia to make sense of the unfamiliar at the Cape of Good Hope. Almost every traveller voyaging between Europe and the East Indies spent time at the Cape, where they engaged with the Indigenous Khoekhoen, enslaved Malays, and European settlers, producing new, hybrid knowledges in the process. My research seeks to understand how new knowledge was produced through a triangular Asian-African-European arrangement.

I am passionate about globalising research and pedagogy in the history of science and provincialising European contributions to 'science' and 'modernity'. My research interests include cultural and intellectual histories of intercultural encounters, the Jesuit China mission, history of scholarship, histories of race, science and empire studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

In 2023, I completed my PhD, titled 'Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian Exchanges, and the Early Modern Sciences', in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. The dissertation reveals how the Manchu conquest of China in 1644 transformed the sciences across Europe. It reorients common accounts of the history of science by showing that several scientific debates typically deemed 'European' originated in China, emerging through local peoples’ interactions with Jesuit missionaries. Focusing on the Jesuit Martino Martini’s writings, my PhD explains how Chinese cultures of knowledge became valuable intellectual and political resources in early modern Europe.

I have held visiting fellowships at top international research institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Science and the Humanities in Utrecht, and the Royal Society in London, who awarded me a Lisa Jardine Grant. I was a Freer Prize Fellow of the Royal Institution for the academic year 2022-23. I remain an Affiliated Scholar of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge.

In 2023, I was elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2025, my PhD was awarded the 8th Dissertation Prize 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 from St Edmund's College, Cambridge. I have been shortlisted twice for the BBC New Generation Thinker Award. In 2024, I received a special mention in the Premio Giovani (Early Career Prize) from the Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza (Italian Society for the History of Science) for my article "Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History".