SOLLAI Michele

Currently a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris, I obtained my PhD in 2021 from the Geneva Graduate Institute. In my PhD dissertation on the history of agrarian development in Ethiopia from the Italian colonial occupation to post-WWII international technical assistance, I delved into the relationship between foreign experts, Ethiopian farmers, and Ethiopia’s highland environments, focusing in particular on the disjunctures, inherent violence, but also encounter and hybridization between “modern” science and technology and “indigenous” knowledge and practices.

Since May 2022, I have been conducting a SNSF-funded project on the global history of fascist biotechnology. The project concentrates on the creation and dissemination of “elite” wheat varieties in interwar Italy, taking them as an innovative framing device on the relationship between science, technology, and the environment under fascist rule. Following the path of “elite” seeds from laboratories to Italy’s agroclimates, I investigate how Italian plant scientists and ecologists conceptualized and acted upon the interplay of these new techno-scientific organisms with local ecosystems and non-human agents. As part of this project, I am also focusing on the global ramifications and long-term legacies of fascist-era “elite” wheat science and technology, a phenomenon which I define as “fascist Green Revolution”. Following the global “travels” of Italian “elite” wheat varieties, their “lives” as seed in farmers’ fields and “afterlives” as germplasm in breeders’ experiment stations, the project tracks the key role of fascist-era biotechnology in the global evolution of plant genetic improvement and ecological transformation over the 20^th century. To this end, I concentrate on the transnational seed networks that link fascist Italy with Latin America, particularly the trajectories of Italian “elite” wheat seeds in Peru, Mexico, and Brazil from the interwar to the postwar years.

In my second book project, provisionally entitled Breeding Droughtscapes: Crop Science and the Trans-Imperial Origins of Climate Change Adaptation, I will address the historical role of crop science and technology in the adaptation of global food production to drought-prone environments. Its main field of inquiry will be the global acceleration of colonization, development, and capitalist frontier expansion into semi-arid lands from the late 19^th century through the interwar years. In this context, crop science became the primary tool for European settlers to “unlock” the productive potential of farmlands beset by the ever-present threat of drought. As water scarcity, soil depletion, and harvest failure became global problems, the technologies devised to remedy them became global too. Focused especially on the “wheat belts” of French colonial Maghreb, the Argentinian pampas, and Australia’s New South Wales, the project will reconstruct the emergence of a trans-imperial network exchanging knowledge, seeds, and other technologies aimed at dryland ecological adaptation. By tracing the trans-imperial dynamics of science and technology in these “droughtscapes”, the project will allow to historicize present-day science and policy debates on crop genetic engineering and climate change adaptation.

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