Department of History

Jens Amborg is a historian of science, animals, environment, and empire. He is a Wenner-Gren Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Brown's History Department (2026–2029).

 

His first book project, Breeding the Enlightenment: Animals, Science, and Race in Eighteenth-Century France, examines how ideas of race and reproduction emerged through the development of animal breeding as a scientific, economic, and imperial enterprise in eighteenth-century France. His second project, Veterinary Colonialism, explores how veterinary medicine shaped the migration of domestic animals and drove environmental transformations across the eighteenth-century French Empire, with a particular focus on Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Mauritius.

 

He received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 2026, and holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and an M.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In 2022–23, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Annales HSS, The British Journal for the History of Science, and Isis.