Abstracts Archive

This paper investigates how the Chinese started to know about the agricultural value of guano and search for their own potential guano islands in late 19th and early 20th Century. Since the early nineteenth century, because of its nitrate-rich quality, guano has been recognized by chemists worldwide...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 importance of the history of science to science education has been recognized since the founding of HSS, formalized in the establishment of the Committee on Education in 1981 to facilitate “the role of history of science in education at all levels.” While most members of HSS are involved in ...

The aim of this paper is to shed light on an understudied aspect of Giordano Bruno's intellectual biography, namely, his career as a mathematical practitioner. Early interpreters, especially, have criticized Bruno's mathematics for being “outdated” or too “concrete”. However, thanks to devel...

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...

In the 1840s, the French chemist Auguste Laurent turned to the study of the “active principles” of alkaloids, which ranged from the medicinal properties of quinine and cinchonine, to the deadly poison of strychnine, to the intoxicating effects of morphine and nicotine. Laurent had recently retur...

Understanding the sociobiology debate means understanding how its subject matter was presented to the public. The controversy about sociobiology quickly reached the national stage with publications such as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books providing room for debate and partisan cov...

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...

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...

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...

Medical research-, educational-, and public health films have recently been rediscovered by archives and scholars in different fields. The institutional turn to the proper production and distribution of medical films in Austria starts with the founding of the Staatliche Filmhauptstelle in Vienna in ...

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 ...

Unlike the classical microscope, the solar microscope produces its image not in the eye of an individual beholder, but on the wall of a curtained room. Surrounded by darkness, the sun’s light illuminates the greatly magnified image of tiny objects or objects invisible to the naked eye. During the ...

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...

How do textual practices function to make sense out of large data sets, when that “data” is not “given,” but rather narrated in extended prose form? Known as “cases,” “observations,” or “facts,” extended textual chunks formed a key currency of the human sciences into the twentiet...

When Islamic civilization dawned by the emerge of Islam in the seventh century AD, the seed of knowledge was fertilized in the Islamic realm and it was after about a century (i.e., the eighth century AD) that it yielded. This is the beginning of a period of flourishing of Islamic sciences, known as ...

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...

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...

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...