Lisa Onaga (Germany) is Co-Deputy Director of The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG)
Lisa Onaga
Lisa Onaga (Germany) is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), investigating the production, ownership, and authorship of knowledge in agricultural, laboratory, health, and industrial settings.
Her book Cocoon Cultures: The Entanglement of Biology and Silk in Japan (Duke University Press, forthcoming), examines how environmental and genetic control of an insect for industrial silk manufacture underpins the history of the life sciences in Japan. Onaga’s publications include “Making Animal Materials in Time” in Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences (2023); “Insect Histories” Focus in Isis (2024); and most recently, the Osiris volume “Animal Mobilities” (2025).
At the MPIWG, she has led the “Proteins and Fibers: Scaffolding History with Molecular Signatures” Working Group, exploring multidisciplinary methods to study biological materials. Additionally, Onaga leads the “Reclaiming ‘Turtles All The Way Down’” Working Group, which studies human-animal relations in Indo-Pacific systems to engage in biocultural histories. This project builds upon her research while she was an assistant professor in the History Programme of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2012–2017), and will contribute to the CBCW (2026–2031).
