Charlotte is a permanent research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Alexandre Koyré, and she teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Previously, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at ETH Zurich after earning degrees at Oxford and Cambridge.
She has published widely on the social and cultural history of the chemical, physical and astronomical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a transnational perspective. Her work focuses especially on the elaboration of instruments and visual cultures in scientific practice and their circulation among a range of audiences. She is currently working on two monograph projects, an entangled history of photography and astronomy and Brownian motion pictures, a visual history of the physical sciences and their public display in twentieth-century France. Chalotte is currently co-PI of two international collective projects Spectacular Astronomy: history and future of astronomical performance; and Matières à penser: enjeux politiques et culturels de la mise en scène des sciences on the political and cultural meanings of displaying science in public. Together with visual artists, playwrights, curators and museum professionals, she has also explored experimentally the possibilities and limits offered by different media to reflect upon the discourses and representations of science and its place in society.