Research Interests: Marine exploration; living and nonliving marine resource frontiers; seabed infrastructures; speculative futures and scientific imagination; material culture of marine science; histories of biology and natural history; history of malacology; deep and evolutionary time; biological introduction and invasion; symbiosis.

Jonathan Galka is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, and in 2022-2023 he is a visiting scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In Singapore, he is also affiliated with the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art’s project, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss. In 2020-2022 he was a visiting doctoral candidate in the Department of Ecological Anthropology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He studies the history of biology, geology, and speculative futures with a particular focus on how the relationships between mineralogical and other resources and life in the deep ocean have been imagined, constructed, commodified, and governed between 1870 and the present. He also maintains a lifelong interest in mollusks.

Publications:

“Bohemia at the Pacific Seabed: Archiving the Future of Deep-Sea Mining with the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization.” (forthcoming).

with Laurence Bashford. “Terraforming Beautiful China: Island-Building and Chang’E Lunar Exploration in the Making of the Chinese State.” International Quarterly of Asia Studies 53(3), 385-411.

“Liguus Landscapes: Professional Malacology, Amateur Ligging, and the Social Life of Snail Science.” Journal of the History of Biology, 55 (4), 1-35.

“Mollusk Loves: Becoming with Native and Introduced Land Snails in the Hawaiian Islands." Island Studies Journal 17(1), 102-122.

Presentations:

Dreissenid Dreaming: On Human Entanglements with Zebra Mussels,” Learning from Aliens, National University of Singapore Asia Research Institute, May 2023.

“Microbial Mattering and the US Manganese Nodule Program, 1970s-1980s,” American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, March 2023.

“Seabed Topologies: Singapore, Nauru, and the Storage of Meaning in Deep Ocean Land,” Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, Cholula, Mexico, December 2022.

“Empire & Ooze: HMS Challenger, Pelagic Sediments, and the Production of Resource Frontiers from the Deep Ocean,” Law & Society Association Annual Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal, July 2022.

“Toward a History and Anthropology of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone,” Department of Ecological Anthropology Seminar, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia, April 2021.

“Mussels, Modernity and the Mobilization of Invertebrate Sensation,” annual meeting of the Joint-Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology, Philadelphia, PA, March 2021.

Previous Degrees:

BA., History of Science & Medicine; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale University;

M.A., History of Science, Harvard University