Jonathan Galka

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 completed his Ph.D. in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, and in 2025 - 2027 he is a postdoctoral fellow, National University of Singapore. In Singapore, he is also affiliated with the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art’s project, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss. He studies the history of oceanic futurism 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:

Galka, JM. 2024. “Bohemia at the Pacific Seabed: Archiving the Future of Deep-Sea Mining with the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization.” Social Studies of Science (OnlineFirst)

Galka, Jonathan. 2023. “Oceans of Ooze: Deep-sea Sedimentary Data, Mineral Resource Frontiers, and Imperial Continuities in Ocean History." Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53 (5), 481-517.

Galka, JM. 2022. “Liguus Landscapes: Professional Malacology, Amateur Ligging, and the Social Life of Snail Sciences.” Journal of the History of Biology, 55 (4), 689-723. 

Presentations:

“Deep Flow: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and Archipelagic Histories of the Future after Empire," Reimagining the Pacific, Institute for Advanced Global Studies, University of Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan, March 2025); International Congress of History of Science & Technology (Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aorearoa New Zealand, June 2025).

“Shrimp, Nickel, and Flowerhorns: Novel Configurations of Conservation Practices in Sulawesi's Ancient Lakes,” Habitats of Heritage: Peatlands, Mangroves, and Freshwater Swamps in Southeast Asia, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (Singapore, November 2024).

“The Nodules are Alive and Well”: Benthic Biota, Mineral Resources, and Mulispecies Histories of the Abyssal Seabed," 4th World Congress of Environmental History Meeting (Oulu, Finland, August 2024).

“Deep-sea Sedimentary Taxonmies, Technologies of Abundance, and the Logics of Resource Transitions,” SHOT-ICOHTEC Joint Meeting (Viña del Mar, Chile, July 2024).

“The Work of Waiting for the Future in the Singaporean Deep-sea.” Critical Minerals in/as Context. Asia Research Institute. National University of Singapore (Singapore, May 2024.

Previous Degrees:

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

M.A., History of Science, Harvard University