Dr Nuno Castel-Branco
Research Fellow, Faculty of History
About
Dr Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Physics at the University of Lisbon.
Previously, he worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science was published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2025.
Dr Castel-Branco's research has been generously supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Program, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Royal Society and, more recently, the John Fell Fund from the University of Oxford. His writing has also appeared in publications such as Isis, Renaissance Quarterly and Annals of Science, as well as in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Scientific American.
Expertise
- History of Science
- Science and Religion
Selected publications
- The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science (U. Chicago Press, 2025)
- "Thinking the Earth with the Body: How the Anatomist Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) Read History in the Earth’s Strata." Isis 115 (2024)
- “Physico-Mathematics and the Life Sciences: Experiencing the Mechanism of Venous Return, 1650s-1680s” Annals of Science 79 (2022)
- “Material Piety: Science and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Portugal” Renaissance Quarterly 74 (2021): Winner of Oliveira Marques Prize for Best Article in the History of Portugal
Media experience
Dr Nuno Castel-Branco has media experience including writing for broad audiences in publications such as The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American (examples below) and has his own weekly newsletter, Stories of Science | Nuno Castel-Branco.
Recent media work
- Stories of Science (Substack)
- Why the Pope is Right to weigh in on AI (The Washington Post, 2026)
- The sweet scientific vindication of ‘I told you so’ (The Washington Post, 2026)
- Galileo and the Pandemic (Wall Street Journal, 2021)
- Galileo and the Pope Fell Out over a Story about a Cicada (Scientific American, 2021)
Languages
English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish