Abstracts Archive

During the first half of the twentieth-century, neurosurgeons in the US linked differential experiences of brain/intracranial tumors such as meningiomas, gliomas, lymphomas, pituitary adenomas, and craniopharyngiomas to biological difference. In 1937, for instance, Harvey Cushing wrote that “brain...

The paper discusses the history of the food calorie as a case study for the popularization of scientific expertise as an ambivalent process of responsibilization. When chemists introduced the calorie to Americans in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, food and bodies became quantifiable ...

Roger Bacon's Scientia experimentalis is driven by a new apocalyptic Christian vision of reform and renovation on earth. It involves the manipulation of light and sight in the production of new technologies of war. It involves a new vision of Chemistry/ Alchemy in the renovation of the human body. S...

This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in colonial South Asia. It brings together rich empirical histories of the process of selecting, translating, and publishing the sciences by indigenous elites for Indian readers in regional languages. Th...

Focusing on the case of Greece, this paper examines the way nuclear science was introduced to developing countries during the 1950s as part of Cold War political processes. Through the Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program and before the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency...

This session seeks to look at the role of research- and educational films as material documents. The interest of the contributors lies in defining the epistemic significance of science films, that were used for either educational or research purposes within the natural sciences and how they found th...

The Illustrated London News (ILN) published a regular column on science in society from the late 1880s. Titled under various labels, “Science Jottings”, “Science and Natural History”, “The World of Science”, this column sought to provide the British public with a scientific engagement of...

How have scholars used the methods of science to write stories about the human past and predict humanity’s future? How have conceptions of scientific evidence and theory shaped the writing of history across disciplinary and temporal boundaries? This panel considers three such cases from the Enligh...

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium was the largest international scientific congress held in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Era. This event was the centrepiece of China’s strategic pivot in terms of its approach to international scientific outreach during the 1960s, away from exist...

In 1928, the Berlin Geographical Society launched an investigation into whether Hermann Detzner (1882–1970), a former colonial surveyor, had misrepresented his New Guinean expedition in his book, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen (1920). The investigation stretched on for four years and drew in a who’...

“It is remarkable how slow natural philosophers… have been to make use of [Lagrangian and Hamiltonian] methods… [But] now the feeblest among us can repeat the words of power and take part in dynamical discussions” (Maxwell, 1879). Through their work in the 1860s and 70s, James Clerk Maxwell ...

The historical narratives on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry granted to the Baltic-German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) hardly address the strong support Ostwald received nor the reasons presented in their nomination letters. Considering to be relevant presenting the reasons behind Ostwald’s pr...

In 1800 American physician Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815) published a book-length treatise titled on goiter and North America and dedicated it to his friend and mentor Johann Frederick Blumenbach (1752-1840). Within its pages Barton takes the seemingly niche topic of goiter or "swelled neck" and ...

Different authors have highlighted that invisibility, doubt or ignorance are not natural states of the population, simple absences of information or knowledge, but the outcome of active and effortful cultural and political processes. This paper argues that science diplomacy has played a crucial role...

At the turn of the nineteenth century in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, public and private secondary and higher schools, both confessional and secular, began to acquire scientific teaching objects on a regular basis in support of modern science education. Not only did these many objects function a...

This paper explores the aesthetic of ‘place’ and the emergence of science parks in the 1980s through a study of British Telecom Labs in Martlesham Heath, rural England. Above BT Labs’ entrance is a plaque engraved with ‘Research is the Door to Tomorrow’. BT Labs inherited the plaque from i...

In 1902, a contributor to Popular Science affirmed that “The era of the amateur scientist is passing; science must now be advanced by the professional expert.” Throughout the twentieth century, amateurs have been increasingly excluded from the production of scientific knowledge. But since the 19...

Just after the Second World War, a large interdisciplinary group of scientists from all over Europe and some of overseas, joined efforts to found a new science called Filmology. The war had demonstrated the pervasive effects of film as a propaganda tool, on both sides of the conflict. These scientis...

Science in Africa has often been perceived as a tool of empire, a force of ‘epistemicide’, or as diametrically opposed to African knowledge. Recently, historians of science have adopted a more nuanced view which, while sensitive to colonial hierarchies, emphasises circulation, appropriation, and...

The organization of research in astronomy in the past half century reflects wider historical trends, showing a contrast between the cold war era and our current regime of neoliberal globalization. Based on examples from the presenter’s research on the history of astrophysics in the Max Planck Soci...

Historians of science have widely investigated the impact of the atomic bomb on the development of post-WW2 life sciences, thoroughly documenting how the dissemination of scientific resources associated with nuclear energy shaped biological knowledge, laboratory instrumentation, and medical practice...

While historians of science rightly take the importance of quantification for granted, over the course of the modern period the sciences of mathematics and computation have generally become less focused on quantity. Numerical knowledge claims have continued to exert undeniable force in discourses fr...

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras was set up with West German assistance between 1959 and 1974. From its beginning, Indian and German actors differed in what kind of engineering school IIT Madras would be and hence how its engineers should be trained. The Indian planners envisioned IIT...

This paper focuses on the technical assistance programs of the International Atomic Energy Agency as both the beginning and the embodiment of modern science diplomacy. According to its statute, the Agency, a political and diplomatic international organization within the United Nations system, was au...

A few programmable computers existed already in the 19-thirties and forties. Around 1955, larger numbers of commercially produced computers became available. In the years 1968-1974, researchers working in different fields of mathematics and physics met at international conferences with titles like `...

Like many of its European counterparts, the Portuguese Scientific System went through a radical transformation throughout the 20th Century. To a limited extent, these changes were a response to some internal pressures (Higher Education and Colonial Enterprises) and in tune with the international/Eur...

By the mid-nineteenth century, works by scientists such as Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin had threatened traditional conceptions of the natural world, drawn heavily from scripture and from the natural theology of William Paley. Much attention has been paid to debates with t...

The sciences and the humanities have not only been sharing practices, concepts or epistemic virtues with one another, they also cooperated in a concrete, practical and material way. Around 1880, scientific archaeology emerged. In several instances, “historians of material culture”, meaning archa...

This panel turns to postcolonial Zanzibar, Uganda, Kenya, and Mozambique. Here, panellists analyse how African vernacular knowledge challenged biomedical strategies of malaria elimination in Zanzibar; how medical cartographers studying Burkitt’s lymphoma configured Uganda as a centre for medical r...

I examine conflicting accounts of “scorpion suicide” to explore the entanglement of colonialism, anecdotes, and nascent scientific journals in the late 1800s. The tale of the scorpion surrounded by fire choosing to turn its sting on itself is one of the most striking images of animal self-destru...