Noemi Di Tommaso earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Bologna in 2023, with a dissertation on the correspondence of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and its role in the circulation of natural knowledge in early modern Europe.
Her research focuses on the history of science and natural history between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular attention to scientific correspondences, visual practices, and the ways knowledge was observed, recorded, exchanged, and employed. She is especially interested in the relationship between science, art, and material culture, as well as in the contribution of women to the production and circulation of knowledge in early modern Italy.
She studied at the University of Bologna, the Université de Tours, and the University of Warwick, where she was a Visiting PhD Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2021-2022). She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Milan.
Her current research explores the relationship between visual practices, material culture, and the production of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. Focusing on figures such as Francesco Redi, Francesca Fontana Aldrovandi, and Maria Selvaggia Borghini, she investigates how scientific observations, drawings, paper technologies, correspondence networks, and material exchanges shaped the creation, circulation, and validation of knowledge between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Articles:
Noemi Di Tommaso, “Sailing the Ocean of Nature: Francesca Fontana Aldrovandi in Early Modern Bologna,” Annals of Science 82/1 (2025): 44-73.
Noemi Di Tommaso, “The Erudite Pratictioner. Francesco Redi’s communication Strategies,” in Visual, material and print culture in the early stages of the institutionalisation of science: The Accademia del Cimento as a multifaceted case study, ed. Giulia Giannini, Physis 59/2 (2024): 373-408.