ORCID: 0009-0004-4526-7793

Marco Armiero (born in Naples in 1966) was an ICREA research professor at the Institute of History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Professor Armiero is a truly global academic, with a wide-ranging international career spanning several continents and prestigious institutions. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and Stanford Universities, a visiting professor at Berkeley and the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and recipient of the prestigious Barron Visiting Professorship at Princeton University (which he declined). For ten years, he directed the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH, turning this academic institution into a global benchmark for research and dissemination that placed the humanities at the centre of contemporary mobilisation around the socio-ecological crisis. Through his numerous publications, Professor Armiero exerted a significant influence in multiple fields and also beyond the academic sphere. Throughout his career, he combined prestigious achievements with a passionate commitment to working with marginalised communities, promoting environmental, social and narrative justice.

At the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Professor Armiero will lead an ERC Advanced Grant project focusing on the relationship between the Catholic Church and ecology. 

In 2021, Cambridge University Press published his book Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump, which made a significant contribution to the current debate on the so-called Anthropocene. The book became a reference for researchers and community organisers around the world; it was translated into Italian, Spanish, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, French and Chinese, while translations into Portuguese and Indonesian are currently in preparation. In 2022, Renmin University of China hosted a symposium dedicated to this work, while Italian public television devoted a 30-minute programme to it. In the same year, he published, together with two former students, the first environmental history of Italian fascism, initially in Italian and later translated into English by MIT Press and into Spanish by Comares. In 2023, he published La tragedia Vajont. Ecologia politica di un disastro (Einaudi), translated by MIT Press (2026).
 

Professor Armiero is, above all, a pioneer. He is one of the founders of environmental history in Europe; he is recognised as having initiated a line of research on the environmental history of migration, and his contribution to the consolidation of environmental humanities is widely acknowledged, as evidenced by the high number of invited lectures he receives. Concepts such as the Wasteocene, toxic narrative infrastructure and fascist political ecologies became staples of mainstream research news. His success in terms of funded projects and academic achievements served as an example to younger generations of researchers, demonstrating that it is possible to succeed without renouncing radical views.