Biography
Noemi Quagliati is an art and visual historian whose work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities, history of science and technology, and animal studies. She serves as the principal investigator of the research cluster “Ecologies of Making: Material Culture Beyond the Human” at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities. Before joining the EUI, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice with the project “Bird's-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon. Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem.”
She earned her PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, where she focused on landscape and aerial photography in WWI Germany. Alongside her research, she has taught courses on German eco-aesthetics (Junior Year in Munich, LMU and Wayne State University) and North American photography and art (Amerika-Institut, LMU).
Her academic path has included visiting research stays at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley (2018), the University of Georgia (2023), and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2025). She has been offered research grants from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research at RWTH Aachen University. In addition to her academic work, she contributed to the modernisation of the Deutsches Museum’s aviation section by researching early aerial photography.
At the EUI, her current research explores how visual practices shape planetary thinking. By drawing on archival records from the European Space Agency (ESA), she is developing critical methodologies to analyse remote sensing imagery used to represent and communicate climate and environmental challenges. On these topics, she is co-editing the forthcoming volume “Planetary Waters: A Challenge between Abstraction and Empathy” with Bloomsbury, and curating the workshop series “The Aerospace Image: Making the View from Nowhere” with the Network Topographic Visual Media.