Lilian Kroth

(she/her)



Lilian Kroth on Svalbard (research residency at ARTICA). ©Tom Warner

As a researcher in philosophies of nature and the history and philosophy of science, I study how the natural world is understood through concepts, scientific instruments, and aesthetic practices. Currently, I am affiliated to the Philosophy Department at University of Fribourg, where I am a contributor to the projects Aerial Spatial Revolution and Seeing like a Satellite (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) and a member of the research group Aesthetics&Critique. In my current research, I engage with the longue durée of methods to understand Earth and climate along the vertical axis, as well as with contemporary philosophical perspectives on remote sensing technologies.

I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2023. My PhD research engaged with concepts of ‘limits’, ‘boundaries’ and ‘frontiers’ as interdisciplinary formations in the work of French philosopher of science Michel Serres.

I studied Philosophy (BA, MA) at the University Vienna and Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Between 2021 and 2024, I have been an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin in the research groups “Energy and Climate” and “Critical Thinking in the Plural”, and between 2023-2024 an associated researcher at the University of Groningen. While in Cambridge, I co-organised the CRASSH Research Network Remote Sensing. Ice, Instruments, Imagination, hosting a series of meetings and events around remote sensing in the polar regions.

Across these engagements, I am interested in how the natural world is understood through philosophical concepts, scientific instruments and aesthetic practices. Crucial for this is the question of how concepts travel, shape methods, aesthetics, and ultimately intersecting ways of understanding. In the context of aesthetic practices, I particularly engage with the role of drawing as a way of thinking. Featuring in a broad range of work—from conceptual sketches in philosophical texts, to scientific visualisation and its own artistic medium—I use and study drawing as an epistemic device that both reflects and generates knowledge.