Abstracts Archive

This paper explores a 1925 meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, during which the British colonial administrations of eastern Africa agreed upon the dialectical basis for Standard Swahili. If examined from the standpoint of the 1920s, this decision seems a typical story of imperial appropriation and...

The Natural Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century is mostly associated with their famous professors, known for their inventions or their method of teaching, in which they used a wide range of instruments. In this talk, I will explore who in addition of the teaching...

This paper explores the view of Nature expounded by the tenth-century Muslim philosopher Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992). al-ʿĀmirī’s understanding of Nature—concerning both its identity and its activity—is a hybridization of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Neoplatonic metaphysics...

Large-scale exploitation of new gold ore reservoirs in Russia, California, and Australia from the 1830s onwards shifted the relative prices of silver and gold, disturbed monetary systems around world, and fanned interest both in retrospective statistics and prospective geology. This paper uses Germa...

Beginning in the 1660s, but especially after 1680, critics of astrology began to make historical prophecies of their own. According to this prophecy, one would soon encounter astrological beliefs only in the past, and reason would soon, once for all, reconquer the popular mind from superstition. Pie...

Aesop’s fables, a corpus of animal tales from ancient Greece, take the form of morality tales in which non-humans embody all-too-human weaknesses such as vanity, sloth, credulity and selfishness. One of the translators of the fables, the Anglo-Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville, would later write ...

In the 1960s and 1970s, the care of individuals with severe and persistent forms of mental illness in mental hospitals came under sustained critique in the developed world. Asylum care was criticized as dehumanizing while several anti-psychiatrists questioned the scientific status of psychiatry. Sev...

Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, peopl...

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...

Positioned on key maritime trading routes, ravaged frequently by cyclones, and visited periodically by devastating droughts, weather and climate were key concerns of colonial Mauritius. Focusing on the period 1850 to 1920, this paper examines how tropical cyclones were reckoned with by colonial admi...

Clustering around the introduction and proliferation of the birth control pill in 1960 U.S., I present a cultural history of this invention’s enduring consequences for the liberatory imagination through an intertextual conversation between an unexpected trio: science fiction novelist Ursula Le Gui...

In the desert of south-eastern Spain, the development of horticulture has resulted in a landscape of plastic greenhouses known as ‘the Plastic Sea’. In this area, a complete transformation of the landscape has been taking place – not merely changing aspects of it, but a radical rethinking of i...

Upon seeing Lord Rosse’s rendition of a nebula in 1845, John F. W. Herschel declared to a large audience that “he could not explain to the section the strong feelings and emotion with which he saw this old and familiar acquaintance in the very new dress.” Previously, when at his own telescope,...

In the 20th century, agrarian change was dominated by the industrial ideal, in which both farms and farmers were made Modern—rational, efficient, technologically-sophisticated—spurred by ideologies of productivism and progress. These transformations were buttressed by a constellation of collabor...

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...

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’ ...

Aristotle's Categories is one of the most influential and heavily commented on texts to survive from antiquity. It is so influential, and presents such a neat contrast to Plato's Theory of Forms, that he is often taken as virtually inventing categorialism as a tradition single-handedly. Yet this is ...

Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, peopl...

Between the 1730s and the 1760s, a number of large bones were found in the Ohio River valley. They were widely believed to be the remains of ancient elephants that had been washed to North America by the Deluge; Buffon and Daubenton also concluded that these were elephant bones. In the 1760s, some o...

In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the interpretation of comets acquired a peculiar dichotomous notion. As phenomena that originated in earthly realms, according to Aristotelian belief, comets were increasingly interpreted according to their accompanying celestial configurations. The apparit...

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...

In the nineteenth century, air started to be considered not just as an element, but as a techno-scientific resource. The laws of thermodynamics provided an instrument to exploit air power (specifically, pressured air), and scientists and engineers thought about using it, among others, for the transp...

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...

The seventeenth century was an intense period of study of volcanoes and earthquakes. Major European thinkers such as Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher, and René Descartes all had something to say about the causes of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. While none of their theories proved completel...

Anatomy is a widespread metaphor among eighteenth-century British authors. Besides its proper meaning in medical contexts, ‘anatomy’ is frequently put into phrases such as ‘anatomy of nature’, ‘of the mind’, ‘of human nature’, or ‘of the light’. The common core of these different...

Anthropologists studying American Indians groups in the 1880s and 1890s occasionally remarked on community sects dedicated to the consumption of peyote (Lophophora williamsii) for spiritual purposes. These “peyote cults,” which spread from Mexico into the central US in the late nineteenth centur...

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 ...

In the late 1920s, Åke Gustafsson and Herman Nilsson-Ehle started experiments of induced mutations at the Svalöf Plant Breeding Station in Sweden. Already in the mid-1930s, the first viable mutations appeared, and in 1940 an extended research program was set up. Gustafsson devoted much of his scie...

As scholars now agree, astrology played many roles in science, society, and culture in medieval and early modern Europe that we still do not fully understand. The belief that celestial bodies could influence human beings and nature at large was profoundly rooted in the premodern European worldview. ...

The College of Sorbonne was founded in the University of Paris by Robert de Sorbon in the mid-thirteenth century. Soon after its foundation, thanks to several large bequests, it included two collections of books : a library for loans and a chained library for consultation. Both collections were repr...