Dr.Catarina Madruga

Catarina.Madruga@mfn.berlin
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In 2026, I am a Visiting Scientist working together with Dr. Ulrich Struck on interdisciplinary methods for provenance research, in the context of the international project "Ein Geschenck von Senghor", funded by the Marc Bloch Zentrum - Provenienzforschungsfonds. From Dec. 2020 to Dec. 2024, I worked as a researcher at the Centre for the Humanities of Nature in provenance research projects led by Dr. Ina Heumann and funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, documenting colonial context collections in the MfN. 

Vita

Catarina Madruga is a scholar of science and collection history specializing in European natural history museums and their portrayal of the displaced biodiversity of colonized African territories. She earned her Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Lisbon (UL) in Portugal with a dissertation titled “Taxonomy and Empire: Zoogeographical Knowledge on Portuguese Africa, 1862–1881.” 
Her previous work includes roles as a curator of historical collections, exhibition designer, museum educator, and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Science at UL, as well as provenance researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting student at EHESS in Paris and at HPS in Cambridge and received a fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. Together with Dr. Déborah Dubald (University of Strasbourg), she is co-editor of the special issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge on “Situated Nature,” which was published in 2022. She is a co-founder of the international and interdisciplinary research collective “Collections Ecologies”: collecte.hypotheses.org.