Biography

Deirdre Moore received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2021 with her dissertation, ‘The Heart of Red: Cochineal in Colonial Mexico and India’. Her research focuses on how complex relationships between humans, plants and animals led to the production of valued commodities in the early modern period with a concentration on the history of cochineal dye insects in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Deirdre’s research has been supported by the American Indian Studies Graduate Student Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Research Grant, the Tyler Fellowship, Garden and Landscape Studies Department, Dumbarton Oaks and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada among others.

As a Max Weber Fellow, she will revise her dissertation for a monograph and work on additional publications from her dissertation research and a second project.

At Harvard, Deirdre helped teach courses on technology and democracy and the historiography and methodology of the history of science. Her teaching interests include the history of early modern commodities, the history and origins of international trade in the early modern period and the history of entomology and insect interactions with human communities.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

Ongoing

• Environmental challenges and climate change governance
• Expert Knowledge and Authority in Transformative Times
• Transnational Democracy in the 21st century
• Digital transformations and society
• Inequality, welfare and social justice

Completed

• Technological change and society
• Decentering Eurocentrism