Abstracts Archive

Seed banking has emerged as a solution to the crisis of diminishing plant variety due to human and mono-culture agricultural encroachment. This paper is a small piece of a larger project that studies the conditions that led to the emergence of seed banking, the diverse practices of seed curation, an...

Littorals are interfaces between worlds, where land and sea meet and mingle. The production of knowledge about these areas, pivotal for trade, travel, and interaction, as well as their graphic depiction and narrative representation, has had a crucial role throughout human history. Of particular inte...

In her Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), often considered the first textbook of analytic philosophy, British philosopher L. Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) presented a coherent long durée vision of the science of logic. Contrary to a caricature (popular then and now) that presents mathematical log...

The emerging technology of radio posed epistemic difficulties for a range of disciplines in the twentieth century and prompted interdisciplinary initiatives such as the radio laboratory (Rundfunkversuchsstelle) at the Berlin Academy of Music, led by musicologist Georg Schünemann from 1928 to 1935, ...

French nineteenth-century toxicology was a science made for the prosecution in criminal poisoning cases – a science conceived for and mostly made in the Cour d’Assises. The main purpose of toxicologists was the detection of small quantities of poisons in corpses in order to provide unquestionabl...

In making an attempt to explore the “medical incentives” and the “interests of the capitalist agencies” involved in the project in locating the vectors of diseases prevailed in the Assam tea plantations of British India, the paper argues that ideas of medical welfare was instrumental both in...

One of the main problems of astronomy in the mid-nineteenth century was to calculate the stellar distances and build a system of measurements that would allow to know the positions of the stars, distances, orbits, etc. This scientific task required the search of a point of observation in the south o...

Environmental historians increasingly refer to the postwar epoch as the ‘the Great Acceleration’, a period characterized by a significant increase in human impacts on ecosystems across the globe. Meanwhile historians of science dedicate growing attention to attempts to monitor and manage these h...

Alfonsine astronomy flourished in Latin Europe from the second half of the 13th to the middle of the 16th century. It is arguably among the first European scientific achievements and shaped a scene for well-known actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There has been, however, little detailed analy...

This session will focus on the use of maps and the practices of scientific mapping by different social groups and cultures over different periods of time. Discussions of eighteenth-century planetary mapping, nineteenth-century terrestrial and botanical mapping, and early twentieth-century climatolog...

This paper opens by considering a peculiar phenomenon in scientific history – namely, the invention of the anatomical flap-book in the 16thcentury, in which a reader can lift a torso flap on a picture of a seated figure to reveal the organs beneath. Thus the reader replicates the experience of the...

"The Outline of History" (1920) by H. G. Wells is an ambitious title narrating the "whole story of man" from prehistory to the Great War. Wells adopted an unconventional approach comprising the natural world and human civilizations together. Before introducing the dawn of early civilizations, the bo...

In this paper I will consider the format and purposes of the conferences organised by the biggest and most impactful international organisation created during the Second World War: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). UNRRA’s many conferences, ranging from small mee...

This paper will explore Russo-American knowledge exchange in the context of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1900-1902). This expedition was organised by the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas, and funded by the president of the American Natural History Museum, Morris K. Jesup. It involved...

Ubiquitous in chemistry today, structural formulae constitute one of the cornerstones of modern chemistry. Yet the early history of the formulae is still poorly understood. The standard account displays a strong national bias toward Britain because existing studies focus predominantly on British che...

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...

Different forms of corporeal improvement emerged between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Humanists, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, tried to educate the elite and rulers in books like his how-to manual ‘Institutio Principis Christiani’ (1516) dedicated to Prince Charles, the future Emperor Cha...

In 1983, member states of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) adopted the non-binding International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources. Although ostensibly motivated by concern over "genetic erosion"—that is, the loss of genetic diversity in crop plants as a result of agricultural i...

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...

“We are come ashore into a new World,” declared Nehemiah Grew in the dedication to his 17th century publication commissioned by the Royal Society. The world he went on to describe, however, did not include any of the typical features one might expect from a treatise on the exploration of new ter...

If you can spray them then they are real” is Ian Hacking’s pithy answer to the question of when we should believe in the existence of microscopic entities we cannot see. Much history and philosophy of science has concerned the second half of Hacking’s slogan. Historians have investigated how s...

"Dark figure” means estimating and calculating the number of unreported or undiscovered crimes and is therefore a statistic of hidden yet ostensibly real occurrences. The terms names something that mostly evades general knowledge and counting, and often instills angst. “Dark figures” are figur...

This panel brings together anthropologists and historians of science and technology to explore how agricultural landscapes are (being) remade through diverse ways of knowing. The 21st century brings with it a brave new world of biotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, microbial research, precis...

The idea of a general legality in nature is found in the writing of Roger Bacon already in the thirteenth century. Bacon moved towards a new conception of nature by rendering natural regularities into laws. He wrote of the law of reflection, the law of refraction, the law of the gravity of water and...

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 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 ...

In 1726, the Spanish Benedictine friar Benito J. Feijoo (1676-1764), in his best-seller Teatro Crítico Universal, defended women’s intellectual capacities. Analysing medical and philosophical theories about how ideas were produced, he argued that female bodies (cold and humid) were perfectly suit...

This session examines the history of technological efforts to manipulate airs in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. In particular, the four panelists discuss institutional efforts to control and improve air in prisons and hospitals, industrial efforts to re-define air as a powerful and productive s...

Today in China publicly minded social scientists are enthusiastically employing the methods of participatory action research, a form of engaged scholarship most famously associated with Brazilian philosopher of education Paolo Freire. Chinese social scientists typically treat participatory action re...

Quite unlike other European empires, Portugal’s was marked by the persistence of a manuscript culture well into the age of print, by the decentralization of its imperial investigative institutions, and by colonial medical challenges that gave metropolitan physicians particular influence over imper...