Abstracts Archive

Following the model of the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture, Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Entomology was founded in 1922 by western-trained Chinese entomologists with support from agricultural merchants, the provincial government and American specialists. As the fi...

While historians have shown the importance of networks in nineteenth and early twentieth century European science, women’s networks have hardly been examined. This paper aims to promote a fuller understanding of scientific communities by analysing the intricate connections between gender, class, a...

How evolutionary biologists have defined animal courtship has had profound consequences for their understanding of how Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection might operate among humans. One of the most remarkable applications of evolutionary logic to human behavior came from Donald Symons’ ...

Exhibitions are social constructions in which information and archives are selected by professionally diverse teams, whose work may be influenced by institutional and financial contingencies. In natural history museums, expography has drastically changed during the last two centuries. Scientific and...

Never officially enforced or renounced, Lysenkoism in socialist Yugoslavia was propagated since 1945 and lingered on well into the 1950s, even after the Tito-Stalin Split precipitated an early and dramatic de-Stalinization. In 1954, Mirko Korić (1894-1977), biology professor at the University of Sa...

My paper will demonstrate how the character and the content of a discipline at a moment that it seems to have become a solid and accepted one, are still under vivid discussion. When the Fifth international meeting of geneticists in 1927 in Berlin took place, participants felt that genetics was now a...

Contemporary models of development are the result of the encounter of different research traditions such as molecular genetics, cell biology and tissue and organ culture. While molecular genetics was a privileged focus of historical analysis, research in tissue and organ architecture did not experie...

In the summer of 1929, Raymond Pearl, editor of the Quarterly Review in Biology, responded to English biologist J. H. Woodger with a warning. Woodger had submitted a lengthy, sophisticated essay on theoretical biology to the QRB. Though he recognized it as an important contribution, Pearl thought it...

Scientific interests in both the origins and the respective qualities of the different “races” (or “stocks”) that made up the Italian population predated the unification of the country, when they prompted heated political debates. However, the question gained further actuality in the interwa...

In this presentation, I will study the transformations of the concept of “race” in French sero-anthropology between the 1940s and 1970s, focusing in particular on the work of Jacques Ruffié and his collaborators, at the Centre d’hémotypologie of the French National Centre for Scientific Rese...

This paper examines the materiality and functions of butterfly nature printing, so called lepidochromy, in early 20th-­‐century Japan. This technique complicates the relationship between specimen and image as well as between entomology and the decorative arts, but has to date remained on the marg...

British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace was a freelance collector. During his expedition to the Malay Archipelago he had collected 125,000 specimens, mostly insects and birds, thousands of them previously unfamiliar to European naturalists. Wallace dried, labeled, preserved and packed the specimen...

In the eighteenth century, European porcelain became a critical site for the study of insects. Its pristine, white body made it ideally suited for capturing the incandescent colors of the rapidly growing number of both “local” and “exotic” species. Meanwhile the smooth, rounded forms of most...

In close alignment to the preceding paper of the panel (Krämer), this paper explores the entanglement of nineteenth-century natural and cultural histories further. Specifically, it traces how and why nineteenth-century botanists claimed a role for themselves in the writing of cultural history. Most...

This paper examines a scientific career of one of the most prominent genetic engineering scientists in South Korea, Dr. Jin-soo Kim. As he often introduces himself, he is “an entrepreneur and chemist-turned-biologist.” He is quite renowned for his work on genome editing at Seoul National Univers...

This paper investigates different research traditions in early German-speaking theoretical biology. A century after the term ‘biology’ was coined, a number of scholars started to argue for the need to develop a ‘theoretical biology’. While through the works of, among others, Johannes Reinke ...

Despite a surge of recent scholarship on the long and broad history of biotechnology, the Edwardian era does not immediately spring to mind when considering the engineering of life. Yet the early twentieth century saw an ambitious attempt to artificially cultivate and disseminate the parasitic Empus...

By using three different examples from Denmark, France and Germany, this presentation highlights the diversity of image production in the formation process of scientific entomology in Europe. It will explain methodological debates around making knowledge claims as well as the social contexts of late...

Historians of science have long recognized the centrality of collections such as cabinets of curiosity, gardens, and museums to the study of natural history. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that, as the life sciences became ‘modern,’ the importance of such collections was eclipsed by th...

This paper explores the human-assisted transoceanic migration and resettlement of the African Palm Weevil in Malaysia and S.E. Asia, and the consequent environmental and social upheaval that emerged at the intersection of biological symbiosis, neocolonial labor policies, accelerating economic change...

Since Janice Neri’s magisterial book „The insect and the image“, insects and their images have been put firmly on the map of the histories of science, visual culture and education. Further studies in the field have appeared recently but we are still lacking a comprehensive account of the impor...

This panel examines some of the various forms and techniques of anatomical representation used to construct and convey scientific understandings of human difference over the long nineteenth century. As anatomists cut into and made objects from the body, they did so with questions about the similarit...

Most histories of entomology have analyzed insect eradication strategies in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.A. This session brings together scholars conducting new research on twentieth-century entomology in multiple places, many of them settler societies: provincial China, U.S.S.R., Malaysia, Kenya an...

Literature on the circulation of natural knowledge in the Atlantic world offers rich discussions regarding the significance of non-European peoples in the development of colonial and metropolitan science and medicine. The Americas has been a foundational geography in this scholarship. Historians hav...

What did it mean for something to be the “material basis” of life, or heredity, permeability, or metabolism before molecular biology? What conceptions of matter did biologists rely on as they tackled new research topics? In the latter half of the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth) ...

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cranial or cephalic index was a widely used calculation for racial classification. This particular measurement, which could be applied both to skulls and to the heads of living people, allowed the comparison of members of ancient and biblical civi...

Much has been said about how the choice of experimental organisms matters, how they open possibilities and impose constraints on a research program and often push an inquiry in an unexpected direction. The same might be said about the kinds of phenomena researchers come to study as representative of...

In 1977, Lindley Darden and Nancy Maull focused attention on interfield theories, defined as “theories which bridge two fields of science.” Interfield theories, they noted, “are likely to be generated when two fields share an interest in explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon and ...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the so-called “mechanical” and "chemical" means were the most frequent answer when locust swarms threatened the crops. Different governments and administrations around the globe resorted either to the use of traps, barriers, fire or to digging up eg...

In the historical memory of the twentieth century science the figure of the Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov looms large. Here, I tell a less familiar story, one that reveals how Vavilov’s genetic geography research has become entangled with the beginnings of the Annales school of historiography. ...