Abstracts Archive

While polymath and first Russian member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Mikhail Lomonosov’s research interests were famously broad, he began and ended his career as a mineral scientist. After initial study and work in mining science and mineralogy, he dropped the subject, returning to it...

The historiography of Richard Owen has focused on certain aspects of his character; from his difficult personality, rivalries, keenness on power to his museum enterprise and his standing-point on transmutation. However, an integral understanding of him still lacks in the literature. More specificall...

Ever since the human mind was constituted as an object of science in the late-nineteenth century, its immateriality has remained an enduring stimulus. Curiously, for most of a century, in most of the world, making the human and the mind susceptible to scientific investigations has required the use o...

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a methodological controversy emerged around the scientific problem of understanding human color vision in evolutionary terms. While the first experimental psychology laboratories were being constructed across Western Europe and North America to s...

In the decade preceding World War II, the so-called Prague Linguistic Circle (Prague linguistic school) developed the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. While the original circle practically ceased to exist during World War II, its ideas were clandestinely revived and developed during the rule of the C...

“I can date very precisely the moment when I conceived the idea of maintenance methylation and its use to remember patterns of DNA modification and control gene expression” wrote John Pugh, a ‘father’ of modern epigenetics, in a letter: ”This was on 14 March 1973 at 5.20 pm in the seminar ...

It was for both science and empire that East India Company employees lugged (or rather, employed Asian porters to lug) a panoply of fragile instruments into, and specimens out of, the Himalaya in order to account for what were only just coming to be acknowledged were by far the highest mountains on ...

In the early modern period, most scholarly works (as well as many maps, instruments, etc.) included a printed dedication. Historians of science have studied such dedications mainly as a window on patronage relationships. That aspect is important, but cannot be the whole story. After all, most reedit...

Boyle’s mechanistic interpretations of fire and the ‘spring of air’ are relatively well known. The elusive link between these two branches of his science—in particular his sustained and original work on the nature of fluidity—remains understudied, partly due to Newton’s long shadow in th...

The panel explores different cases of the transnational scientific communication and cooperation involving the two competing Cold War blocks as well as the agents in-between. Socialist countries deemed the transnational and, in the context of the Cold War, trans-ideological scientific communication ...

While recent scholarship on the history of science publishing has focused on scientific journals, self-confessed ‘journal publishers’ only came into being in the latter half of the 20th century. This poses the question how this shift towards periodicals as core products was brought about: What o...

Partha Chatterjee in 'Texts of Power' emphasizes the need to track institutional practices while tracing the emergence of disciplines in colonial Bengal. In his account of the processes of hybridization of the natural sciences however, the role of popular periodicals is limited to merely translati...

This session explores novel perspectives on publication formats in 20th century science publishing. Thereby we build on recent scholarship of print media in the sciences, yet we address a rarely looked at period that is crucial to understand current debates about publishers or media. When and why be...

In 1921 and 1922 the Utrecht-based chemist Ernst Cohen organized two informal international conferences. Their aim was to break the boycott of scientists from the former Central Powers that was the official policy of the new international scientific organizations established in the wake of the First...

One of the most successful natural history publications of late eighteenth-century Britain was British Zoology, authored by the Welsh naturalist, Thomas Pennant (1726–98). This book, that met four major editions between 1766 and 1812, was produced in a range of different formats and contains numer...

Many scientists rely on distributed technologies and organizations that reach between laboratories and provide resources for groups of researchers with shared interests. These might be databases and repositories, newsletters and journals, or even libraries and seminars. They are often tightly cleave...

Between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, contributions to knowledge about nature depended on correspondence networks as a means for exchanging information, ideas, and specimens. The importance of these networks to the most eminent figures in science has been widely acknowledged....

The Lithophylacii Britannicii ichnographia [British figured stones] (1699) by Edward Lhwyd, the second keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was the first illustrated field guide to English fossils. This paper analyses the book’s physical creation—the collection of specimens, fieldwork sketches and th...

Environmental activists and environmental historians were not particularly concerned with the oceans until recent times. While transformation (and degradation) in land was clearly visible, it seemed that the ocean well could take all kinds of poison without great distress. While there was a long tra...

Over the past two decades, STS scholars have argued that the high-stakes, low-certainty conditions of much contemporary scientific research imply an urgent need for new ways of doing science. They have proposed variants such as “Mode 2 science” and “post-normal science,” which would draw pol...

After World War II, as science became attached to the discourse of international development, analyses of the scientific literature became a key source for producing national comparisons of scientific productivity. This paper will focus on the rise of the Science Citation Index and will suggest that...

Scholarship on French science during the Old Regime has given considerable attention to the Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in Paris in 1666. This is not surprising, since the Academy quickly became one of the preeminent scientific institutions in Europe, until it was disbanded during the French ...

From its inception, assisted reproductive technology (ART) – ranging from artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation to surrogacy and egg freezing – invoked public questions of the world to come. This constellation of emerging technologies was simultaneously credited with the disruption ...

The term “citizen science” has become very popular among scholars as well as the general public. The rapid expansion of citizen science, as a notion and a practice, has spawned a plethora of meanings. One of the most common usages today refers to voluntary lay participation in the production of ...

It is widely recognized that achieving sustainability in the twenty-first century will require a reorientation of scientific research towards “usable” knowledge, particularly when it comes to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, was created to translate sc...

17th century medical science around the globe thrived on the lively exchange of information and material between centers of higher learning, such as in Europe universities and academies. Key players were not only the teaching professors of medicine themselves but students, physicians, non-affiliated...

Geneticists rely on working collections of data and of living organisms. Databases capture, order and communicate standardized genetic information, while stock centres make available vast arrays of standardized yeasts, bacteria, viruses, plasmids, cell cultures, animals and plants. Collections of bo...

From 1851 onwards, coinciding with a period of relative political stability, Portugal achieved the necessary conditions for the development of its imperial plan. The Portuguese Government believed in the wealth of its African possessions, despite several public discussions about the future of the te...

To the early modern imagination, Brazil was a land of natural and human wilderness. I investigate this metonym by focusing on the centrality of human beings and their bodies to Portuguese projects of imperial expansion. I trace changes between Aristotelian views of humanity ascribed to Jesuit missio...

From about the turn of the twentieth century, international conferences have become standard features of scientific life. Yet although they have frequently featured in the historiography, the role of such meetings has predominantly been discussed as a background against which the real action of inte...