Abstracts Archive

Classroom films have certain aesthetic and didactic characteristics, and they are linked to specific conditions and practices of education within a political system. In the GDR, nearly every child was confronted with a certain audio-visual culture, its specific rhetoric and its visual 'pathos formu...

This panel examines the role of Soviet/Russian scientists within the context of the international initiatives concerning global environmental change that emerged strongly from the 1970s onwards. It reflects upon the contributions made by Soviet scientists to the key debates around climate change and...

Locke’s career has been increasingly recognized by historians as contributing not only to the history of philosophy but also to the history of science and medicine. Over his life Locke engaged with medical practice (working with the prominent physician Thomas Sydenham) as well as with natural phil...

During the 17th and 18th centuries a network of Chinese savants, interested in studying Arabo-Persian natural philosophy strove to reconcile conceptual and theoretical differences between the traditional Chinese and Arabo-Persian treatments of the natural world. For that end, members of that Sino-Is...

The nineteenth century witnessed a gradual liberalisation of the mathematical objects and forms of mathematical reasoning permissible in physical argumentation. Historians of physics note, but take for granted, the co-development of the necessary mathematics and its unproblematic application to phys...

The collaborative marriage in 1920 between Sally Hughes and Franz Schrader emerged following their interaction at Woods Hole and the Zoology Department at Columbia University. Their personal and scientific interests matched perfectly, and they forged a fruitful scientific partnership that lasted ove...

This paper investigates how scientists and film-makers at the Yale Clinic of Child Development redefined normal child development and established norms of human behavior and social interaction. Part of the evolving science of child development in the interwar years, these researchers sought techniqu...

By recognizing the essential, lived dimension of the ideas people use to organize their thinking about the world, biography has the potential to restore motivating ideals to historical understanding. In this paper I will develop this thesis by considering the ways the idea and ideal of reason were s...

Animals, as defined by Aristotelian terms, are actualized in connection to their movement, potential, and purpose. Our knowledge of animals in the history of science, furthermore, as developed from this historiography, has been constrained by foci upon specific charismatic animals at work or in moti...

At the close of the nineteenth century, a writer in the Lancet commented that ‘Sleeplessness is one of the torments of our age and generation’. He thus articulated the perception, which had been the source of mounting cultural and medical anxiety over the previous decades, that the conditions of...

This panel responds to “the animal turn” in history of science, addressing non-human animals in historical research as well as challenges in writing about other animals. Animal bodies and their behaviors are explored across a range of time periods and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from labo...

My study addresses the birth of Republican China’s policy on transnational biological expeditions, which, I argue, was enacted in response to a Japanese biological expedition along the Yangzi River in 1929. Through the engagement, Academia Sinica (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan), China’s national academy ...

This paper sets out to chart different views of history and progress in the study of the deep past in the late eighteenth century. It focusses on the Brussels naturalist François-Xavier de Burtin (1743-1818) and examines his scholarly network, his letters, a range of published works, and society ar...

My paper will explore the translation of botanical knowledge on paper, in the context of colonial botany as it was performed by European actors in the New World ca. 1550-1700. I focus on the practices of draughtsmanship and printmaking in the works of a few early modern naturalists and image-makers ...

Drawing from literatures that reframe meteorology through the lenses of infrastructure and socio-material “assemblages,” this paper considers how the material dimensions of weather science in India were distinctive. Through the production of quantitative data, leaders of the India Meteorological...

There is no bright line between representing and intervening – even microscopes can be used to, for instance, fabricate atomically-precise devices. Yet materials scientists routinely make a rough distinction between tools associated with characterization and those associated with fabrication. In g...

This session takes its name, “Object Lessons,” from recent interest in thinking through objects or things across a variety of disciplines. Material entities have become newly valued for what they can teach us about our cultural and natural worlds. Arguably, natural history has long been engaged ...

After conducting path-breaking experiments on introducing token economies in mental hospitals, Australian psychologist Robin Winkler spent a sabbatical in the United States (1970-1971). There, he became acquainted with anti-psychiatry and initiatives in community mental health. After returning to Au...

Byzantine scribes and copyists working with manuscripts stemming from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries employed several strategies on arranging and presenting knowledge with regard to astronomy and astrology, especially reworking Greek-Ptolemaic astronomy and incorporating Islamic astronomical...

Prevailing views cast the Pacific as a desolate, sparsely populated expanse between continents and a blank slate for the assertion of Western epistemological and territorial claims. Burgeoning East Asian scholarship, migration studies and indigenous critical works adumbrate a radically opposed view:...

In this paper, I examine how historical accounts of experimentation on nonhuman animals can be written in a way that does justice to tested animals as agentic and response-able living beings. In accordance with recent calls to decenter the human, nonhuman animals are given center stage, not because ...

The writing of “history” traditionally comprised both natural and human history; but, so the story goes, in the course of the eighteenth century the two historiographies parted, and specialists started to focus on one or the other. By the mid-nineteenth century, at the latest, we have profession...

2019 will mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Culianu’s Éros et magie à la Renaissance, 1484, an influential and controversial work of early-modern intellectual history. The central claim of the book is that Renaissance magic, as a specific form of practical knowledge bridgin...

This paper explores the intersection of ideas about nature, ingenuity (“ingenio”) and invention in seventeenth-century Spanish thought through an examination of the natural historical and natural philosophical writings of the Jesuit scholar Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), the first holder o...

Since 1945, nuclear science and technology have oscillated between nationalism and internationalism. While the first decade after WW II was mostly characterized by military applications and national security, the launch of the American Atoms-for Peace-program in late 1953 promoted international coop...

Over the course of the twentieth century, theoretical biology changed beyond all recognition. Although the field today is synonymous with mathematical biology, when it first emerged it had a drastically different agenda: to critically analyze the conceptual foundations of biology in order to resolve...

This panel is a response to the growing demand for an integrated history of the sciences and the humanities. We identify intellectual common ground between these realms of knowledge by tracing objects and methods that were shared across the boundaries of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Our ca...

Within museum studies, there has been a recent interest in engaging with objects and their material effects as something other than vehicles for human cultural meaning, arguing that there has been a tendency to miss out of “an examination of the physical actuality of objects and the sensory modali...

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries metaphors acquired biologies, and then biographies. Emerson, in 1842, said “Language is fossil poetry”; modernist poets and critics gave criteria for what made a “healthy metaphor”; and it became possible for a metaphor to die. A dead metaphor is a o...

The science writer Robert Ardrey began his 1961 book African Genesis with the arresting line: “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.” But by the end of the decade, it might have been unnecessary to include the second intervening phrase. Although the “out of Asia” hypothesis of...