Abstracts Archive

In this talk, I will explore some of the causal foundations for understanding and evaluating astrological practices in medieval and Renaissance Europe. I will do so in order to approach a topic that has been bothering me for a few years now, namely, whether or not we should call astrology and its va...

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...

From the late-19th century to the early 21st century, space and planetary imaging has evolved along with the introduction of new technologies/techniques and new disciplines in science, engineering, art, and design. The 19th century astronomical artists and illustrators could hardly anticipate the Ho...

In 1977, a pair of unmanned spacecraft built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), launched on a mission to explore the outer solar system. As the spacecraft arced toward Jupiter, JPL’s team of imaging scientists prepared to receive and shape data collected by Voyager's scientific instrumen...

Invasive insect species became a constant preoccupation of agricultural officials in the U.S.-governed Territory of Hawaii during the early twentieth century. Biological control constituted the primary means of pest control at the time, and the territory’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and...

Several experiments from the history of physics were adapted for teaching purposes – most of them originate from the long nineteenth century. These references to historical experiments can be found both in school teaching as well as in university lectures. Most of these experiments were introduced...

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 ...

The ability of vegetable and mineral substances to affect the human body has long stood poised between the desirable (food and drugs) and undesirable (poisons and toxins). The demand for the intoxicating virtues of drugs both therapeutic and recreational has been paralleled by the aversion to harmfu...

In the early 1960s, a semiautonomous Division of Computer Science existed within Stanford University’s Department of Mathematics. While the division had initially grown out of interest in numerical analysis within the mathematics department, members of the computer science division became increasi...

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...

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...

The seventeenth century witnessed a surge of studies that deal with the interior, history and make-up of planet Earth. In the realms of theology, (biblical) history, mining, geography, alchemy or the study of fossils, natural philosophers and other specialists were exploring the different histories ...

As the American History of Science Society holds its annual meeting in Utrecht, one of the key academic centers on the European continent, one may surmise that the field has returned home. Yet, this hardly reflects how today’s world of scholarship is constituted: in the historiography of science, ...

Infusoria captured the attention and imaginations of naturalists and philosophers in the years at the turn of the nineteenth century. From Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Denis Diderot through Erasmus Darwin to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and Lorenz Oken—a diversity of figures explored, expe...

Scientific institutions have long occupied a central position in the processes of production, transfer and certification of knowledge. Since their establishment, such organized bodies developed their own identity traits, became actors with a variety of functions in world affairs, and underwent tempo...

In 1877 the Scottish Meteorological Society proposed the establishment of a meteorological station on Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, but attempts at raising funds came to nothing. Having read of the efforts to establish an observatory, the English meteorologist, Clement Wragge, offered to ...

This paper explores how naturalists in the nineteenth century used ice to understand geologic timescales. Further, it considers the broader cultural representations of the past and future of the planet, in which ice was deployed as a register, index, and interlocutor of geologic time. I focus on Bri...

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience and philosophical inquiry depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars have become increasingly interested in ho...

In this paper I will focus on the period c. 1530-c.1560 and on a cluster of Italian naturalists, their painters and patrons, in order to address the following two issues. The strong visual turn of natural history and the role of non-printed images in this period; the links in terms of methodology an...

Institutions are inherently communicative contraptions. Their language of operation encodes activities and endows governing bodies with a tongue that is instrumental for exercising power. Institutions tend to stabilize their verbal means in order to set up patterns of normativity for various practic...

In this paper, Hui examines the proliferating and often conflicting attitudes about background music in laboring and public spaces from the 1940s through the 60s. It was alternately described as a tool of fascism, a tool of communism, a solution to petty crime, a form of therapy, a delightful experi...

The early Royal Academy of Sciences relied on images in the process of their natural philosophical work. Drawings and prints helped communicate new ideas, inventions, and observations, and they circulated both within Academy meetings and to wider audiences. While many members of the Academy made dra...

It is often claimed that analysis is grounded on the principle of contradiction alone and synthesis is grounded not only on the principle of contradiction but on pure intuition as well. This distinction is inaccurate. In my talk, I discuss the notion of analysis as something that can be grounded on ...

In cases of infanticide, forensic medicine has always played an important role, examining the baby’s and the mother’s body. The mother’s mind and her emotional state were to some extent relevant in the nineteenth-century courtroom, but in the twentieth century psychiatry gained more influence ...

When Descartes equated animals with machines in Discourse on Method (1637), he did not anticipate that he opened the door to mechanical materialists. While very few adopted radical mechanism, mechanistic conceptions of the human body nonetheless manifested in many arenas in early modern Europe, incl...

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...

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...

This paper focuses on integrating African vernacular knowledge about malaria more fully into the history of science, the history of malaria elimination attempts, the history of global health interventions and current elimination activities. In order to do so, it focuses on the the Indian Ocean islan...

Among the many passing fascinations of turn of the century America, consider the eidophone pictures of Welsh singer Megan Watts Hughes. An accomplished vocalist, Watts Hughes discovered that singing into a mouthpiece connected to a resonant plate upon which had been placed a thin film of paste would...