Irina Podgorny is a permanent research fellow at the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). She studied archaeology at La Plata University, obtaining her PhD in 1994 with a dissertation on the history of archaeology and museums. She has been a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin and at MAST, Museu de Astronomia, in Rio de Janeiro. Her current research project deals with historic extinctions, spider silk, and destroyed museums. In addition to her academic research, she collaborates with Argentine cultural weeklies and Latin American artists. A Humboldt Foundation Fellow and recipient of the Georg Forster Research Award, she has been a member of the editorial board of Science in Context since 2003 and History of Humanities since 2017.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Podgorny, Irina. Extinction, Refuse, and Sciences of Past Life in Modern Worlds (working title). Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2026.
- Podgorny, Irina. Desubicados. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2022.
- Podgorny, Irina. “Traveling Mermaids, Traveling Materials: Museum Objects and the Decentering of the Histories of Knowledge”. Journal for the History of Knowledge 5 (2024): 253–263.
- Podgorny, Irina. “Fakes in the History of Archaeology”. In Handbook of the History of Archaeology, edited by Laura Coltofean and Margarita Díaz-Andreu. Oxford University Press, 2024.
- Podgorny, Irina. “From Quilmes to Gondwana: Exploring a ‘Latin American’ History of Science”. Physis 1 (2023): 197–211.
- Podgorny, Irina. “Revivir de la basura: Las extinciones históricas, la experiencia del pasado y la arqueología de los fósiles recientes”. In Otros pasados: Ontologías en el estudio de lo que ha sido, edited by Benjamin Anderson, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, and Felipe Rojas. Universidad de los Andes, 2022. https://musa.com.co/otros-pasados/libro/ART-OP-10-IRINAP-NOV01-2022.pdf.
CURE RESEARCH PROJECT
Shipwrecked Arks: On the Perishable Nature of Museums
CURE research project 2025/26
MEDIA COVERAGE
28 NOVEMBER 2025
Borges, Marechal, ClorindoTesta y los huesos que piensan: genealogía del descreimiento argentino
Article by Irina Podgorny (CURE-Fellow)
Clarín
EVENTS ARCHIVE
12 MAY 26
Trains. A movie by Maciej J. Drygas
Soirée cinéma avec introduction par Irina Podgorny
03 FEBRUARY 2026
Tuesday seminar series in February
Tuesday seminar series
19 NOVEMBER 2025
Trash to Treasure: Extinction, Refuse and the History of Prehistoric Archaeology
Käte Hamburger Lecture
13 NOVEMBER 2025
Trash to Treasure: Extinction, Refuse and the History of Prehistoric Archaeology and Related Sciences of the Past
CURE out and about