Abstracts Archive

In one of the six perspectival projections in The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy (1756), Thomas Bardwell includes an ancient sculpture of an elaborately curved pair of ram’s horns. His long study of the rules of perspective and “puzzling after this mathematical Truth” notwithst...

This paper examines how psychologists treating children as though they are little scientists helps explain the fate of recapitulationism in the human sciences. Thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries from Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel to G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and Jean Pia...

What were the epistemic configurations of experience in the medieval sciences of soul and body? Simple sense perception, inspectio, anathomia, iudicatio by common sense, pre-universal experientia, and expertise all occupied distinctive, yet decidedly standardized spaces in the cognitive realm of the...

The staff of the Science Museum in the Second World War years were faced with a dilemma. With its first purpose-built building opened in 1928, only two decades later they already felt their displays to be very old-fashioned. The galleries devoted to evolutionary sequences of technologies divided by ...

Ayurveda, an Indian traditional medical system is an all-embracing system of medical teachings which encompasses a number of different historical lines and layers. The term āyurveda means, literally, “the knowledge or science (Sanskrit veda) for longevity (āyus)”. There are eight branches of �...

In the eighteenth century, algae were wretched organisms, receiving scant attention from naturalists, who largely preferred animals as their subjects of research. This predilection held true for J. F. Blumenbach, who devoted less than 5% of his influential Handbuch der Naturgeschichte to plants and ...

In 1770, a Mexican criollo naturalist and antiquary, Jose Antonio Alzate, published the first selenography in the Americas: this map of the moon was a small engraving inserted at the end of a pamphlet entitled Eclypse de Luna, dedicated to Charles III of Spain. The print was a copy of a widely circu...

While a fugitive from the Reign of Terror, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet composed his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794), a brief yet sweeping account of humanity, divided into ten epochs, melding political history with the history of kn...

While historians most often write to an audience of fellow historians and academics, clear exceptions are made—for instance public history efforts or the development of textbooks and curricular materials. This paper will explore the use of historical analysis specifically as a tool for policymaker...

This panel will address the use of science and technology studies to address particular audiences, re-evaluate perceptions of failed promises, and examine how the history of science and technology can be utilized as a tool for reconsidering the future. Presenters will focus on three case studies: 1)...

This article examines the reception history of Jan van der Straet (Stradanus)’ Nova reperta, the iconic visual account of the modern inventions of the scientific revolution. It reconstructs how contemporary publics responded to Stradanus’ prints within Europe and across the globe. As I argue, th...

Much of mid-twentieth-century US food science and technology had a prospective and promissory orientation — one that combined dire forecasts of a food-scarce future with robust claims by industry to provide solutions that could mitigate the effects of the coming catastrophe. Such was the case with...

How can we envision our Star Trek future in space? Contributing to the conference theme of “Telling the Stories of Science,” this paper will discuss the intersection of audience, concepts of failure, and visions of the future as represented in the cultural history of the Space Age. Mythic vision...

Since the nineteenth century, medicine and science have been perceived as a monolithic tool for domination, inextricably linked to Europe’s imperial expansion into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To that end, nineteenth-and twentieth-century colonialism resulted in medical and scientific materi...

This paper considers how posthumanist perspectives are actively transforming the ways of thinking around animals in the arts. With the emergence of Performance Art during the 1960s, art history starts to explore living, non-human animals. Theatre and performance studies were already confronted with ...

This roundtable asks how politics and methodology operate in interrelations between Science Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies, as well as in conversations with other Area Studies. The panel’s participants engage Women’s, Jewish, German, and Chinese Studies, but we will, together with the audience, be c...

The research theme is the reception of Georg Cantor's ideas in Russia. Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky have been influenced by Georg Cantor’s ideas and wrote a paper “On the symbols of infinity” in 1904. In this paper he says that transfinite mathematics of Georg Cantor is an example of sy...