Simona Boscani Leoni
دانشیار · Social and Cultural History of the Alpine Region
University of Lausanneمعرفی
Simona Boscani Leoni is an Associate Professor in the History Section of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lausanne, where she teaches modern history. She began her position on August 1, 2022, after serving as a substitute MER and professor at UNIL (2018–2021) and as a senior scientist at EPFL (2021–2022). She has been a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow in Modern History at the University of Bern since 2013.
Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Alpine region in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on the history of science, knowledge networks, and environmental history. Her work explores how scientific inquiry, religious beliefs, and societal transformations intersected in the Alpine context, especially through the study of figures such as Johann Jakob Scheuchzer and Conrad Gessner. She has co-edited significant volumes on natural history and mountain studies, including Natural History and Mountains: Crossed Views from the Andes to the Himalaya (2021) and Mapping the Territory: Exploring People and Nature, 1700–1830 (2022).
Her recent publications, including numerous review articles and edited contributions, reflect a strong engagement with themes such as scientific correspondence, questionnaire-based knowledge collection, and the cultural perception of nature. These works span interdisciplinary domains including history of science, environmental history, and visual culture, often analyzing how natural phenomena were documented, interpreted, and disseminated across Europe.
She is an active member of several scholarly associations:
- Swiss Society for the Study of the 18th Century
- International Association for Alpine History
- Swiss Society for Rural History
- Scientific Council of the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum
- Editorial board of Atlas zur Geschichte Graubündens, 1525–2024
She has held visiting professorships at the EHESS (Paris) and the University of Padua and has collaborated with institutions such as hallerNet.org on digital editions of scientific correspondence. A book on the scientific discovery of the Alps is forthcoming from Viella (Rome) in spring 2023, with an English translation planned for 2024/25.
