Abstracts Archive

This paper will explore the huge and highly influential natural history media output, including television, radio, encyclopedias and comics, as well as contributions to the mainstream press and scientific journals, by Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente (1928-1980), a pioneering and highly influential nat...

Alchemical language is an example of scientia poetica, its Decknamen are coded, ornate and instable. But alchemical language shouldn’t remain ultimate riddle it has come to represent. Couldn’t a computer bring clarity into the poetics of alchemy? After all, poetry is a system and systems can be ...

A parallel development in the history of the sciences and the humanities was the structural organization of small-scale, practical, and method-oriented training by German university professors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several disciplines in the humanities and the sciences, historical studi...

In the rapidly growing recent historical and literary scholarship on the genre of biography, a quote from Virginia Woolf has achieved classic status: "How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailors' bills, love letters and old picture postcards?" It pointedly frames the biographe...

In the history of the circulation of knowledge certain objects may be considered as paradigmatic of the ways through which information about territories and people was produced. The namban screens and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias – RGI, both produced in the second half of the ...

My presentation investigates two key concepts that both in historical and museological research need more analysis on – virtual travel and immersion – and their relationships with the 17th century English natural history collections, commonly known as cabinets of curiosity. Virtual travel is a c...

Over the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, classical music was increasingly perceived as a universal language in Western countries. At the same time, however, intensifying processes of globalization and growing historical knowledge about the musical past revealed the plurality of musical s...

The passing of the Society Editorship from Utrecht to Mississippi State University presents an opportunity for those overseeing HSS publications to discuss their work with members, and to highlight the range of ways that members of every career stage and specialization can participate in the publica...

Biography appeals to historians of science again, but perhaps not in a form that most biographers would recognize. There are now biographies of animals, of inanimate objects and of concepts, of institutions, of landscapes. This flourishing of biographies in recent decades can be seen as our discipli...