As historians of science, we are all somehow engaged – whether it's with our research, our teaching, the dynamics of our field, or thinking about how our expertise might be brought to bear on the myriad of challenges facing our world today. This year's plenary session explores what it currently means to be an engaged historian of science with an eye toward inviting further conversation with our audience and within the history of science community more broadly. The session will feature a small number of young colleagues whose research and related activities exemplify creative forms of engagement both within and beyond our discipline. This will be followed by a presentation by Sheila Jasanoff, in which she draws on her broad expertise to reflect on how engaged scholarship deepens our understanding of the roles of science in society and of society in science.The plenary is being supported by the Elizabeth Paris Endowment for Socially Engaged History and Philosophy of Science. The Endowment honors the life of Elizabeth Paris, a scholar who was committed to integrating the intellectual side of the history of science with its social, institutional, and policy aspects. Learn more about Elizabeth Paris.Organized by Lissa RobertsDoors open 17:30

Hosted by HSS President Bernie Lightman in the Kapittelkamer (adjacent to the opening reception in the Janskerk Room), this event gives you the opportunity to "pick the brains" of established and senior academics in a casual and convivial environment.ALL Graduate Students and Early Careerists are welcome to take advantage of this unique opportunity. But space is limited! To reserve your spot e-mail hss.gecc@gmail.com by July 20th.Food and beverages provided during the opening reception I the Janskerk Room will be available to participants of the Mentorship Meet and Greet.Graduate and Early Career CaucusHSSGECCHSSGECC

Most histories of entomology have analyzed insect eradication strategies in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.A. This session brings together scholars conducting new research on twentieth-century entomology in multiple places, many of them settler societies: provincial China, U.S.S.R., Malaysia, Kenya and Argentina. These studies reveal how insect population management was entangled with new visions of anthropogenic 'natural' and agricultural landscapes, pastoral indigenous peoples' perceptions and activities, and the development of global networks of like-minded entomologists. Alejandro Martinez analyzes perceptions of 'natural' insect control as part of creating 'balanced' ecological landscapes in early-20th century Argentina. Yubin Shen explores the multi-national network of entomologists (mostly U.S.-China) that created the Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Entomology in the 1920s. Sabine Clark tells the story of cautiously-applied locust control measures in Kenya after 1945, highlighting Kenyan herdsmen's concerns about their cattle being poisoned. Marin Coudreau analyzes the entanglement of insect management regimes with militarized forced migrations and state management of the agricultural peasantry in the late Russian empire-early Soviet Union. Aaron Van Neste details an entomologist's importation of the African palm weevil from Cameroon to Malaysia as a palm-tree pollinator in the 1970s-80s, and the novel multi-species ecologies and labor histories that were generated as a result. Together these five case studies show how both non-scientific workers and global networks of entomologists helped to shape (and sometimes subverted) visions and transformations of natural and agricultural landscapes in South America, Africa, eastern Europe and Asia.Organized by Susan Jones

How international scientific cooperation played out in Cold War politics and knowledge production has been a central concern for historians of science. The connection between U.S. or Soviet technical assistance and the rapid development of science in East Asia has been noted in this context. This panel sheds lights on unexplored but central questions connected to this issue: What did "cooperation" mean to actors in the Cold War context? What socio-political conditions and material infrastructure made cooperation available or led to failure? Wasn't regional cooperation within East Asia important as much as aid from superpowers? Hyun examines how the notion of cooperation was contested, negotiated, and redefined between South Korean and the U.S. scientists conducting ecosystem ecology research in the Korean demilitarized zone during the 1960s. DiMoia illuminates how Japanese and South Korean parasitologists revitalized their colonial medical network in the name of development aid projects after the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965. Luk looks at an international oceanographic project known as "Cooperative Study of the Kuroshio and Adjacent Regions" (1965–1978) and reveals the politics of international cooperation and competition between Chinese and Japanese scientists. Barrett explores the rhetoric and reality of regional cooperation in the planning and execution of the 1964 Peking Science Symposium, discussing China's efforts to establish itself as the central scientific power in the developing world. Bringing together diverse cooperative projects, this panel provides opportunities to rethink the nature of scientific cooperation in Cold War East Asia beyond the history of technical aid.Organized by Jaehwan Hyun and John DiMoia

Sponsored by the Society of the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

In recent years, scholars of early modern science have emphasized the visual aspects of natural knowledge during the period that was once called the scientific revolution. This panel examines how images and knowledge circulated between painters, draughtsmen, printmakers, naturalists and scientific practitioners. Our chronological focus spans from 1500 to 1800, from the German artist Albrecht Dürer's musings on the limits of mathematizing the art of perspective to the visual accounts of James Cook's voyages to the Pacific. We interpret the development of early modern science in a global context, and investigate how European, Latin American and Asian practitioners interacted with each other, exchanging and producing textual and visual information in the process. We also critically examine the limitations of such an approach, paying a special attention to what factors hindered or completely blocked the circulation in the period, both across the globe and across different professional backgrounds. This panel is highly diverse, incl. speakers and commentators from the USA, the United Kingdom, Spain and Hungary, from four different institutions. The speakers range from art historians through museum curators to historians of science.Organized by Daniel Margocsy 

The Flashtalks initiative was begun by Janet Browne (then President of the HSS) in 2017, who partnered with John Krige, then president of SHOT. She and John co-chaired the session at the annual HSS meeting in Toronto and John invited Janet to co-chair the session at SHOT in 2018. The original concept was to provide one full session for graduate students to present a five-minute talk on their thesis project followed by a five-minute question period. (If anyone goes over their 5 minute presentation time they lost the time from their 5 minute question period.). Graduate students were invited to submit proposals on their topic and these proposals were evaluated by Janet and John. The meeting program chairs were not involved in the selection process but were asked to find a morning slot for the session. The Executive Office managed the announcement inviting proposals and was responsible for collecting them for the presidents. The fourteen best were selected to be presented at the Flashtalks session. It was thought that having the presidents co-host the session would add lustre to the Flashtalks and indicate how important graduate student participation was for the annual meeting. This session generated a lot of interest and encouraged graduate students to participate in the HSS meeting. They were permitted to also present a paper in a session if it was accepted.Bernard Lightman (Janet's successor), Tom Misa (incoming president of SHOT), and Marsha Richmond (president of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology [ISH]) were the co-hosts in 2018. Marsha was invited in order to attract more proposals. We had about ten more proposals than we had spaces. The session was a success, attracting a healthy audience and the graduate students who participated appreciated the feedback.The Flashtalks will again take place in Utrecht for the July annual meeting, co-hosted by the HSS president (Lightman), and representatives of ISH and SHOT, though not the current presidents of those societies. It does not appear that SHOT has set up flashtalks for their 2019 conference. At their spring meeting in 2019 the Executive Committee suggested that presidents, or their representative societies, should only be invited when there were joint meetings. 

Sponsored by the Women's CaucusFeminist scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have revealed the manifold ways in which differences of sex, race, and gender structure the production of knowledge. They show how binaries – including feminine and masculine, male and female, active and passive, emotional and rational – imbue scientific practice with local meanings. And they show how gendered commitments shape global concepts like nature, body, and mind. Our panel adds development to this list. Relying upon various insights from feminist STS, each panelist will think through case studies in the history of medicine and the human sciences. Collectively, we explore the cross-cultural ways that gender organizes the scientific study of developmental processes. We foreground a transnational network of scientists who studied how cultures, bodies, and identities changed over time. Barbara Pohl begins in early twentieth century, examining how feminist anthropologists used "gender-critical" methods to understand cultural development in the American southwest. Lan A. Li moves to the mid-twentieth century, recounting how acupuncture analgesia disrupted developmental assumptions about the human body in greater China, Germany, and the United States. Susanne Schmidt lands in the late twentieth century, exploring the anti-feminist commitments of Euro-American developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts. Soha Bayoumi ends in contemporary Egypt, considering how "popular" sexologists have approached questions of modern femininity. Eli Nelson will provide a synthetic commentary, bringing insights from postcolonial and queer feminist STS to our discussion. Together, we will use gender to reinterpret developments in the history of science and medicine.Organized by Barbara Pohl

Over the past two decades, STS scholars have argued that the high-stakes, low-certainty conditions of much contemporary scientific research imply an urgent need for new ways of doing science. They have proposed variants such as "Mode 2 science" and "post-normal science," which would draw policy-makers and concerned citizens into the process of designing and evaluating research. Their stated aim is to democratize the knowledge-making process and orient it more firmly towards users' needs. More recently, scientists themselves have begun to echo these recommendations. They emphasize the value of public engagement for a variety of purposes, from gaining legitimacy for their research, to mining big data, to ensuring that their conclusions will be taken up by policy-makers. This reorientation is evident, for instance, in recent initiatives arrayed under the banner of "citizen science," such as the Cornell bird count or Galaxy Zoo. But how novel are these modes of scientific research? Assessing the degree to which these initiatives depart from "normal science" requires historical and epistemological analysis. Accordingly, participants in this session will analyze past experiments in participatory research in a range of sciences (seismology, climatology, astronomy, biomedicine, and scientific agriculture) and in various transnational historical contexts (from the Progressive Era to the post-Cold War), in order to generate critical historical perspectives on contemporary modes of participatory research. What can history teach us about the promise and limitations of these endeavors?Organized by Deborah Coen

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 analysis of its comprehensive development. ALFA (2017-2022) is a European Research Council-funded research project, addressing this lacuna by studying Alfonsine tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way, drawing on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. For example, rather than focusing simply on individual texts, we are studying manuscript codices as physical objects and computation with such objects as performance. The roles of different instruments and visual representations in relation to manuscripts in various astronomical practices is also addressed. The goal of this symposium is to present to a wider audience some of the first results of the project by bringing together young scholars from Paris, Madison, Madrid, and Lisbon.Organized by Matthieu Husson

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 imperial political and economic affairs. This panel explores these dimensions of Portugal's empire and their consequences for medicine and natural history at the height of European colonialism. The focus on disparate scientific protagonists, chronologies, and colonial spaces, allows each paper to explore how natural knowledge came to be perceived as a solution to the difficult problem of colonial government at a time of fierce inter-imperial competition – from the 1750's to the early twentieth century. If it was unquestionable to naturalists, physicians, as well as to both colonial and metropolitan administrators that the effective government of empire entailed reaping the formidable natural fecundity of Portuguese colonies, this goal remained enduringly elusive. Through an examination of visual and material culture, natural and anthropological collections, labor regimes and power structures, this panel reflects on the importance of natural landscape, built space, travel, and material circulations for the production of knowledge. Rather than choosing between object-centered or human-centered histories, we consider the crucial role of both subjects and objects to knowledge making in the context of Portugal's imperial desiderata. From the Brazilian sertão, to the Angolan hinterlands , São Tomé's cocoa plantations, and the Lisbon National Museum, we explore how natural knowledge was concomitantly used to transform bodies, explore nature, and govern space. Organized by Patrícia Martins Marcos

Animals, as defined by Aristotelian terms, are actualized in connection to their movement, potential, and purpose. Our knowledge of animals in the history of science, furthermore, as developed from this historiography, has been constrained by foci upon specific charismatic animals at work or in motion. In order to enrich our understanding of animals in the history of science, this panel takes movement as its central point of investigation. It examines the relations between various types of movement, from mechanical motion to geographic translocation, and the knowledge of animals' lives, bodies, and excretions. The panel explores a layered concept of animal movement through these questions: How have people tried to understand animals and their physical movements? What kind of scientific knowledge has been produced in relation to animals as they are introduced or re-introduced to various localities? The presenters specifically look into animals as mobilizers of scientific knowledge. Marianna Szczygielska focuses on the movement of elephants into Eastern European circuses and zoos during the colonial period, in order to delve into connections between veterinary science and concepts of zoological species, race, and identity. Shira Shmuely offers a critical analysis of Alfred Russell Wallace's adopted baby orangutan in order to shed light on the malleable boundaries between natural history, hunting, pet-keeping, and experimentation in physiology and anatomy. Sijia Cheng excavates the development of chemistry in late 19th and early 20th century China that emerged from debates over the political control of seabirds and their guano. Tamar Novick examines the 1944 outbreak of African Horse Sickness as the roles of animals as global migrant-laborers began to shift and thus fostered new thoughts about epidemiology and agriculture. Together, these papers offer a critical if not also complementary response to mobility studies from the history of science perspective by investigating how actions connected to the movement, re-rooting, and thus re-contextualizing animals generate new productive tensions among different ways of knowing.Organized by Lisa Onaga and Tamar Novick

Premodern science considered nature through Aristotle's definition of an intrinsic principle, driving species and individuals towards perfection, in a less or more regular manner which allows scientific knowledge. However, sometimes things go wrong-nature incidentally makes mistakes. Can natural errors (like "monsters") be amended? This panel addresses the tensions between regularity and exceptions, description and manipulation of nature in premodern times. How did premodern thinkers justify the exceptions to the regularity of nature? What were the conditions for their assumption that an exception to that regularity was "unnatural"? How did they think they could achieve a manipulation of nature? By "manipulation" we mean the propelling of natural regulated changes towards a preconceived goal. Which presuppositions enabled them to consider the possibility of such manipulation? What was the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological frame that supported this kind of thinking? Nicholas Aubin explores the relation between nature, art, and medicine in the Muslim tradition as expressed in al-ʿĀmirī's thought. Marienza Benedetto addresses the birth of monsters in the Jewish tradition, as found in Maimonides medical works. Nicola Polloni examines patterns of regularity and irregularity of nature in Hermann of Carinthia of the Latin-Neoplatonist tradition. The Latin-Aristotelian tradition of the manipulation of nature is investigated by two papers, both focused on Roger Bacon. Yael Kedar speaks about Bacon's conception of natural legality, and asks whether this new conception fostered ideas of controlling nature, and Jeremiah Hackett investigates the theological aspect of Bacon's "experimental science".Organized by Yael Kedar

This session considers the place of slavery in early modern medicine and natural inquiry. It investigates both the many ways in which early modern medicine and natural inquiry supported the institution of slavery and the settings in which slavery was integral to the production of early modern medical and natural knowledge. At the same time, we aim at casting light on the epistemic role of enslaved communities in the histories of science, medicine and technology. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has examined the institutional apparatuses of early modern imperial medicine, paying special attention to the mobility of individuals, knowledge, practices, objects and materia medica across the globe. However, the place of slavery in early modern processes of production, movement and transfer of natural and healing knowledge and practices has only started to be explored. This session will revisit historiographies and geopolitics of early modern medicine and natural inquiry by investigating their entanglements with slavery in different settings and regions, with a focus on Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. While the investigation of natural/medical knowledge and slavery in the Atlantic and Mediterranean areas has largely developed along separate lines, this panel will adopt different scales of observation to start a dialogue among scholars working in these areas, and explore how the interwoven networks of slavery, science and medicine can shift our perspective on the way we tell "the stories of science".Organized by Lucia Dacome

Biography appeals to historians of science again, but perhaps not in a form that most biographers would recognize. There are now biographies of animals, of inanimate objects and of concepts, of institutions, of landscapes. This flourishing of biographies in recent decades can be seen as our discipline's reinvention of a genre that has been critiqued as naively theory-resistant, conservative, and useful at best as a pretext for contextualisation of scientific work. But this reinvention demands methodological reflection: does biography survive only as metaphorical shorthand, or does it serve historiographical purposes of its own? This panel offers four perspectives on the historiographical functions of the genre, both in its new incarnations and in its more traditional form of the story of a life told by someone else. Joan Richards and Daniela Helbig foreground biography's potential for understanding science as part of the meaning of a lived life, as long argued for by our commentator Ted Porter. In contrast, Roberto Lalli and Lily Huang investigate the historiographical implications of studying other entities in biographical terms: institutions and metaphors. Our shared aim is to examine the different functions of biography as an analytic lens, and to question when and why the framing of a narrative as a life can produce a distinctive historical insight.Organized by Daniela Helbig

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. The next volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of story-telling – science fiction (SF), told through a variety of media – and the history of science. The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach, this volume examines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places, it considers the role played by SF in the history of specific scientific disciplines, topics or cultures, as well as the ways in which it has helped to move scientific concepts, methodologies and practices between wider cultural areas. It explores what SF can tell us about the histories of the future, how different communities have envisaged their futures, and how it conveys the socio-scientific claims of past presents.

Organized by Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis

This roundtable puts the spotlight on 'generation'-the capacious conceptual framework within which issues of procreation and descent were discussed across large swathes of the globe before modernity. Eventually replaced by the apparatus of 'reproduction', which has grabbed most of the attention, 'generation' has a long and complex history of its own. The key notions of productive seed and foetal formation, debates about male and female contribution and ensoulment initially took shape in the ancient Mediterranean world, spread across the Roman Empire and Christianised, travelled further east with the Arab conquests of the seventh century CE, and continuing expansion of Islamic domains, journeyed west with early modern European colonialism, shifting and adapting along the way. Building on the story recently sketched out in Hopwood, Flemming and Kassell (eds), 2018, we propose to take this opportunity to widen and deepen the conversation about pre-modern theories and practices around procreation, about their coherence and diversity, about the causes of both continuity and change. Invited participants are specialists in different periods, from the ancient near east (Steinert), through the Roman (Bonnell Freidin) and Medieval (van der Lugt) worlds, into the early Modern (Astbury), and come at the study of generation from different angles. Each will speak briefly (c. 8 min) to open, offering a view from their areas of study, a summary of the current state of play and how it fits into the bigger picture. The audience will then be encouraged to join the discussion, offering additional perspectives. Flemming will moderate.

How have children defined what it is to know? In this panel, we explore how science molded children, and how children modeled science. Since the mid-nineteenth century, scientists have taken babies and young children as key sites to observe knowledge acquisition in action. Children were, the scientists contended, unpolluted by prior knowledge, curious and shameless, they played seriously, developed rapidly and learned quickly. Although some researchers like Darwin found their own babies useful for naturalistic observation, children entered laboratories only at the end of the 19th century. In the new developmental sciences, children served multiple roles. They offered researchers a proxy for biological evolution, instances of human variation, models of learning and thinking, and tools to rebuild nations and create new futures. Beyond reorganizing relations of the social and biological sciences, research on children offered many women a subject pool that gave them an entrance card to scientific work and a unique view on longstanding questions of scientific method and human nature. Felix Rietmann investigates how 19th century ideas about normal and pathological childhood preceded and conditioned the later sciences of the child. Carola Ossmer investigates how film-makers and scientists at Yale produced normal babies for the New Deal. Jamie Cohen-Cole traces productive interchanges between post-positivist history and philosophy of science and experimental studies on children's cognition: If kids shaped kinds and contents of knowledge, historians of science can find good reason to reconsider conceptions of what scientific methodology, theory and, not at least, a scientist have been.Organized by Carola Ossmer

17th century medical science around the globe thrived on the lively exchange of information and material between centers of higher learning, such as in Europe universities and academies. Key players were not only the teaching professors of medicine themselves but students, physicians, non-affiliated scholars and sometimes missionaries who migrated from place to place and carried memorized topic lists for disputes, transcriptions of lectures and printed books for reference, and letters of introduction. They also brought, distributed, and changed miscellaneous bits of know-how: how to categorize and structure their field of knowledge, how to dissect bodies, to arrange an experiment, and to mix potions and medications. In the history of science, we want to know about the impact that the scholars' regional or imported cultures of learning had on the processes of developing and distributing information for public usage in medicine, such as entries in encyclopedias and other reference books, collected volumes containing recipes and other useful advice, published series or single pamphlets containing more or less elaborate oral disputations and dissertation, cabinets of curiosity with limited or full public reach, and lecture transcripts of professorial courses that students published. Did the distribution patterns mirror or follow the scholars' paths of migration? What happened when incoming scholars hatched different opinions from what was practiced and taught at the new place, what if they differed in technologies and information? This panel traces how migrating medical scholars dealt with conditions of difference.Organized by Anja Goeing

We live in an age of innocence consciousness. Exemplified by the US-based Innocence Project (a non-profit legal network that leverages DNA evidence to overturn cases of wrongful conviction), and dramatized in popular docuseries largely devised and delivered on Netflix's global platform, the pursuit of innocence has emerged as a powerful feature of our times. For most observers this is the product of uniquely modern forces: principled critique criminal justice bias, media advocacy, and most importantly the declarative power of forensic genomics. The forensic framing of innocence, however, has a surprisingly rich and varied history. Taking examples from the heyday of the British Raj and of Cold War America, and the Netherlands in the early twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the panellists examine how innocence has been conceptualized and operationalized as a form of 'situated knowledge,' and ask questions about how claims to innocence are produced, circulated and validated, who gets to benefit from such claims, and what these claims tell us about the time and place in which they were made.Organized by Projit Bihari Mukharji

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, precision agriculture, and data science. With these advances new research methods and models emerge, informing and informed by the shifting knowledges of agricultural practice. But the new is cultivated in, of, or against the old. This panel critically queries these historical and emerging landscapes of knowledge, asking how sedimented infrastructures of agricultural science and technology are influencing the present and being reimagined for alternative agrarian futures. Papers in this panel offer diverse vantagepoints examining the digitization of the Dutch dairy industry, the translation of microbial knowledge from lab to farm, Goethean science and alternative agriculture in the US, and high-tech greenhouses in the Spanish desert. The models science and agriculture use to think with matter, framing what methods of knowing the world are possible and thus what material realities are made. This panel contributes to a growing interest in the future(s) of food production by locating it in the past, and by highlighting its entanglements with knowledge regimes, care practices, animal and human health, and the biopolitics of emerging technology.Organized by Bradley Jones

Materials research has contributed to pervasive, profound, yet largely invisible changes to both society in general and the sciences in particular. From computers to nuclear reactors, many high technologies – including the technologies of theory and experiment – require advanced materials. Yet we have no systematic history of materials research, despite ground-breaking work by scholars such as Klaus Hentschel and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. There is, however, general agreement that characterization and fabrication tools play an important role in nucleating communities of materials researchers, and that the institutions of materials research (professional societies, journals, funding streams, etc.) orient strongly to innovation in the tools of materials research. But what are the tools of materials research, and how have they co-evolved with materials science and related fields that arose in the postwar era? Over the past two years we have organized a collection of essays on the history of tools in materials research, which this panel samples. We use an expansive definition of "tools," from the obvious to the less so. Obvious tools include apparatus for making and inspecting new materials under laboratory conditions: advanced furnaces, sputterers, spectrometers, microscopes, etc. Less obvious tools include the infrastructure of experimentation: standards, lab safety practices and regulations, laboratory buildings. We also examine tools that are so ancient and ubiquitous that they are taken for granted by the policymakers and practitioners of materials research alike: glassware, recipes, balances, etc. Taking these categories highlights the mutual evolution of tools, materials, and research communities.Organized by Joseph Martin

We live amidst a "biometric revolution," a moment of accelerated development of technologies that identify individuals and secure societies by measuring and surveilling bodies. Those technologies centered on the head and the face are advancing especially quickly, exemplified by the growing use of iris scans and facial recognition software in various contexts. While contemporary facial recognition systems seem neutral and novel, this panel demonstrates that they are connected to a longer history of measuring and identifying heads, skulls, and faces. In particular, the papers discuss how race has been a central concern of these technologies, which range from craniometry to photography, DNA sequencing, forensic art, and computer science. In the early twentieth century, scientists from Britain to Iran used head measurements such as the Cephalic Index and the Coefficient of Racial Likeness in order to reconstruct the racial origins of populations. In the present, questions about racial bias and stereotypes challenge the development of Facial Recognition algorithms and Forensic DNA Phenotyping technologies. This panel analyzes the connections between past and present methods of measuring heads and faces, reflecting on the interests of anthropologists, clinicians, computer scientists, and the state in casting these measurements as simultaneously identifying unique individuals and characterizing entire groups of people. Rather than producing a simplistic account of technological development, the papers explore both continuities and ruptures in the history of biometry and ask why certain practices, assumptions, and visions have endured while others faded away.Organized by Iris Clever

For centuries, people have accumulated natural things and arranged them into collections of examinable, comparable, and combinable specimens to deepen their knowledge of nature. In the last two decades, tracking the pathways of natural things through time, space, and taxonomies has become a popular approach in the historiography of natural history in order to understand this collecting phenomenon. Yet, natural things are also elusive things and the quest to follow them often is one of following their traces-the marks, imprints, indices, fragments, and textual and visual inscriptions-incidentally left behind, preserved, or intentionally created in their wake. Attending to the diverse traces historians rely upon to tell stories about natural things, this panel sheds light on the different forms of traces, their epistemic roles, and the conditions under which they emerge. Specifically, in case studies spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the panel interrogates the various material manifestations traces can assume; the practices, procedures, and sometimes intentions by which traces are generated; and finally, the complex interrelations among traces, natural things, and the knowledge of nature derived from both.Organized by Anna Toledano

Today people increasingly use digital technologies to collect data about their body functions and everyday habits. They measure aspects such as sleep patterns, physical performance and calorie intake as well as mood and productivity, in pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement. This rapidly growing popular interest in self-tracking has been hailed by journalists and sociologists as a revolutionary development. Historians know better: there are all sorts of self-measuring tools and ideals for self-improvement that go back to the nineteenth century if not further. Quantification tools such as weighing scales, thermometers and accounting tables were produced in scientific circles, but also gained a more popular usage that we want to trace in this panel. The papers in this panel all discuss aspects of science-inspired self-tracking and self-making in the last two centuries. They bring two strands of interest in the history of science together: first the question how the use of numbers became more widespread in science and society in the modern, statistical age and second the history of scientific self-fashioning. We look at how individuals in the western world became interested in their own measurements, and at how scientific professionals and the state suggested that they should. We explore how ideas about self-tracking were bound up with new notions of autonomy, responsibility, citizenship and self-improvement and we argue that self-fashioning through measurements was one of the ways in which scientific technologies had an impact on individual lives and selves. The panel thus highlights the genealogy of our increasingly metric life today.

National statistical agencies institutionalized the collection and publication of data, as well as its representation in increasingly sophisticated models, in the early 20th century. These new kinds of knowledge came to define modern quantitative social science. With them, researchers hoped to measure, predict, and control mass societal phenomena, such as economic depression and epidemic disease. Scholars have typically recounted this history in national terms – that is, as a history of how governmental statisticians established the nation-state as a unit of analysis and as an object of social science. This panel, by contrast, examines this history's international dimensions, concentrating on research conducted at the League of Nations. The scientific projects that the panelists will discuss were truly global collaborations requiring extensive institutional resources and diplomatic finesse. The League's research continued to influence international organizations after the Second World War. Heidi Tworek will present on the League's public-health research and epidemiological surveillance. Laetitia Lenel's and Max Ehrenfreund's papers will examine the political environments and intellectual contexts in which the League's business-cycle forecasting developed in the 1920's and the 1930's, respectively. Erwin Dekker will discuss the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and his colleagues at the League. These papers by four researchers representing universities in four different countries show how an ideology of internationalism informed the League's projects. This ideology was one of the purest examples of a high-modernist vision of a planned, rational society, the kind of vision that was essential to the development of the sciences of prediction.Organized by Max Ehrenfreund

This session explores novel perspectives on publication formats in 20th century science publishing. Thereby we build on recent scholarship of print media in the sciences, yet we address a rarely looked at period that is crucial to understand current debates about publishers or media. When and why became natural scientists invested in specific formats of print, such as different variants of journals and books, how have such preferences fared and what did this mean for long-term disciplinary developments? How has the "impact" of publications been determined, what functions have journals or books occupied? In brief, we will explore science's paper media (creation, sales and uses) before digitization. This session follows these issues along the problem of periodicity in journals and non-journal formats as viewed from publishers' perspectives in the 1950-60s (Schmidtke), by questioning the concept, the making and the crisis of encyclopedic handbooks in the post-war chemical sciences (Grote), by analyzing efforts to catalogue and measure the impact of publications (Csiszar), and by assessing the role of journals, partly through commemorative practices, in building international and disciplinary communities in the 1950-80s (Daling). We argue that in order to get a more articulated view on recent publishing trends, it is crucial to understand past developments affecting the formation and choice of formats, as well as authors', editors', readers' and publishers' strategies. A commentary (Hagner) will wrap up the session and stimulate a discussion on a pertinent, timely and undervalued topic in the history of science.Organized by Alrun Schmidtke and Mathias Grote

From about the turn of the twentieth century, international conferences have become standard features of scientific life. Yet although they have frequently featured in the historiography, the role of such meetings has predominantly been discussed as a background against which the real action of interest took place. In this session we want to break with this tradition and put the spotlight fully on the conference itself, as a phenomenon. What were international scientific conferences? What kinds of interaction, sociability, and performance did they embody? What was their role in the production of knowledge? How did they mediate participants from different nations, ranks, classes, genders? How have their forms evolved and varied over time? These are many large questions and we do not pretend to answer them all. Instead, we hope to make a start by considering a number of angles from which conferences can be studied: their international character, their inclusivity and exclusivity, and the rituals that have accompanied them as gatherings of expert communities. Together we hope that these may indicate directions toward a fuller understanding of the phenomenon we are so familiar with.Organized by Geert Somsen

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 Hollywood matte painting techniques that would be brought to bear on planetary imaging in the mid-20th century. Likewise, the artists of the early Space Age would feel out of place in the 3D computer visualization labs of today, where images of newly discovered exoplanets are rendered for public consumption. Even with these differences, however, there has been a constant interplay between science and art -- between "real data" and artistic imagination -- that defies a rigid distinction between scientific object and human observer, not to mention that between the work of the scientists and artists. The papers in this session explore this history of imaging and imagining the planets using three examples: the first explores the chromolithographic prints of the artist-turned-astronomer, Etienne Trouvelot; the second examines the artistic and cinematic conventions used by Chesley Bonestell, the leading space artist of the American Space Age; and the third addresses the emergence of digital art and computer visualization and its intersection with planetary exploration; the final paper looks at how the future was imagined in more fanciful illustrations from science fiction and interrogates the relationship between visualization and the cultural construction of the meaning of space exploration.Organized by Matthew Shindell

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 human impacts, especially across borders, in this same period. This session explores one important facet of these transnational initiatives: the tension between, on the one hand, universalizing conceptualizations of the global environment and the centralized institutions that attempted to realize these, and, on the other, the lived experiences and practical concerns of diverse local actors. Taking inspiration from the spatial turn, the session studies how global conservation schemes were translated into projects on the ground. The papers look into various instances of transnational, science-based conservation between the 1950s and the 1980s, including wildlife protection, water management, ocean conservation and the maintenance of crop diversity. Raf De Bont explores different types of 'ideal landscapes' promoted under the flag of ecosystem science by the International Union for the Protection of Nature. Etienne Benson studies controversies over data standardization that took place in the context of the International Hydrological Decade. Lino Camprubí looks into the local and international work necessary to make the ocean into an object of conservation. Finally, Helen Anne Curry examines the political geographies and technical realities of international crop genebanks. Overall, the papers show how in different institutional contexts the project of global environmental management was modified to accommodate particular local policies and ecologies.Organized by Raf De Bont

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 related geophysical phenomena both within the formalities of major international organisations/collaborations as well as less high-profile instances of debate and scientific exchange. To this end, Jankovic's paper focuses on the ideas of the Soviet geophysicist E.K. Fedorov which were promulgated during the 1979 World Climate Conference. Taking advantage of his senior role within the organisation, he advanced a critique of Soviet and Western approaches to the climate change issue during the plenary session, drawing upon his wider understanding of society-nature interaction. In contrast to the prominent intervention by Fedorov, Amramina's paper explores the quotidian activities of Soviet and US scientists under the auspices of the 1972 US-USSR Environmental Agreement which facilitated insight into the Earth's geophysical systems through small-scale exchanges of personnel and collaborative initiatives. Shaw's paper provides a constrast to this US-USSR interaction by focussing on Soviet activities in the Antarctic and their fruitful cooperation with both French and US scientists in advancing insight into long-term climate change at the global level. The final paper (Oldfield) explores the discussions around climate change and climate futures that were evident within the USSR during the 1980s. These understandings would emerge strongly on the international scene during the initial IPCC discussions at the end of the 1980s.Organized by Jonathan Oldfield

For decades, it was widely assumed, even by some historians of science, that the notion of human races had lost any real scientific legitimacy sometime around the end of the Second World War, only to "return" at the beginning of the 21th Century in the wake of the Human Genome Project, as a byproduct of genomic research. Then, a new narrative recently emerged that stopped positing the sudden disappearance of race from the scientific lexicon around 1945, and highlighted instead the shift observed among scientists (apart from a handful of conservative or even plain racist ones) from a "fixist", reifying, physical-anthropological approach, grounded on the identification of "human types", to a more biologically informed exploration of population variability. The aim of this session is to move beyond such narratives by empirically comparing the uses of race as a scientific notion in different disciplinary and political contexts, during the second half of the 20th Century. We will especially explore how anthropologists, sero-anthropologists, and different types of geneticists, active in Europe and in Northern America, either referred to racial characteristics or, alternatively, attempted to circumnavigate an increasingly contested notion. Speakers will pay special attention to the way the scientists they studied either affronted the growing stigma associated with the notion of race, tried to ignore it, or enforced it.Organized by Luc Bevlivet

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space and time. We move from the medieval cloister and university to the early modern marketplace, we journey to the republic of letters that included early modern scholars from Constantinople to London, and we delve into the engagement of early modern scholars with texts and ideas from centuries earlier. Each paper examines a different set of narratives around experience: how Scholastic philosophers interested in metacognition influenced later work in the life sciences; how competing narratives of experience and authority were employed by different healers in the medical marketplace in sixteenth-century Germany and Italy; how stories about experience and experiment became central to the legend of Roger Bacon, and to later narratives about the development of modern science; and, finally, how natural philosophers and physicians from the Ottoman Empire and the Latin Christian West used experience as a basis for creating universal natural knowledge. Taken together, all four papers portray the robust, complex, and contingent ways in which experience presented a path to natural knowledge, either alongside text-based authority, or in spite of it.Organized by Elly Truitt

The broad domain of acoustics that emerged in research settings throughout the modern era is usually categorized as part of the natural sciences. Yet the study of sound is rarely interested in the formal, "hard" description of sound alone; "soft" practices of observation, experiential knowledge, and description generally play their part as well. Our panel addresses this entanglement by investigating the multifold relationships between sound and language-from the modern disciplinary formation of acoustics and the institutionalization of the social sciences and humanities in the late nineteenth century, to the scattering of sound research across specialized sub-fields and industrial arenas, such as computerized speech processing, in the postwar period. During this process, disciplines including electric engineering, musicology, phonetics, linguistics, sociology, and computing all aspired to pin down sound, and in particular the spoken word. They forged different epistemic and representational strategies to that end. The panel will examine these strategies, as well as tracing the dual use of language as a theme and a tool of knowledge production. We are interested in how, as a research theme, the analysis, regulation, and interpretation of language often breaks through frontiers that have formed between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, as well as between academic and non-academic forms of knowledge production. At the same time, we look at the new languages and modes of speaking that were developed as tools to examine, represent, and functionalize sonic phenomena-in auditory cognition, the standardization of music, broadcasting, or speech recognition.Organized by Viktoria Tkacyzk and Julia Kursell

This panel addresses the impact of long terms when engineers, architects, government officials, and entrepreneurs planned revenue and resources during an era of industrial expansion, war, and social engineering. While the paper tools of their trade showed single units, complete time series, smooth lines and calendrical grids for action, they dealt with fractured time. The life-spans of employees and investors were ill-aligned with those of companies, and the deep time of resource deposits was out of sync with increasingly global market cycles and technological progress. In these uneasy arrays of conflicting temporalities, scales and units functioned as 'hinge' technologies and were therefore the focus of polemics and struggles for power. This means for historians that scales and units that populate the working tools of professionals can offer entry points into past battles between standardised time and countertempos, hegemonic scales and their alternatives. This panel presents cases where ideas and technologies of duration, sustainability, efficiency, continuity, compression and expansion caused debate in social sciences, philosophy, and engineering. We focus on mental and material protheses that allowed professionals to shrink long time-spans to push their particular agenda in politically fraught situations, and show how temporally remote events were made to have an impact on the present, though not always as planned.Organized by Sebastian Felten and Anna Echterhölter

Histories of the atmospheric sciences have explored the cultural imaginations, scientific networks, political institutions, and material objects through which knowledges of meteorology and climatology have been produced, circulated and consumed (e.g. Anderson, 2005; 2018; Baker, 2017; Coen, 2018; Edwards, 2010; Fleming, 2016). These have increasingly acknowledged the complex role of instruments and operators, the materialities in the production of data, and the (unstable) networks that had to be continually re-made for scientific and political goals. More specifically, these include the design, organisation and collation of log books, the affordances of laboratory equipment and travelling instruments, the capacities of computers, the sheer weight of paper in data archives, and the socio-material infrastructure of observation networks or analytical work. In this panel, we take the discussions of materiality further, drawing on scholarship that has placed the material at the centre of historiography, not as a determining force, but as a push to understand materialities within socio-material 'assemblages', 'networks', or as coproduced between human and non-human actors (e.g. Barry, 2013; Daston, 2000; Turkle, 2007). These socio-materialities rarely worked in a singular direction - the material did not merely constrain or generate what was possible. Indeed, scientists frequently extended, altered or challenged the 'limits' and internal functions of these technologies and materials. Likewise, technologies were frequently used for multiple concurrent purposes, and different components created different possibilities and constraints. Papers in this panel consider in what ways and with what effects socio-materialities shaped, opened up, and/or constrained scientific work in the atmospheric sciences.Organized by Samuel Randalls and Martin Mahony

In the past decades, historians of medicine and historians of the body have produced a considerable amount of research on the circulation and transformation of medical knowledge and practices across different social groups, while historians of science and technology have shed light on the role of artisans in the making of science, both intellectually and practically. Numerous scholars have also pointed at the importance of embodied processes of knowledge making. Still, relatively little attention has hitherto been devoted to a finely grained study of the historical realities of ordinary bodies in the early modern world – the way in which bodies were conceived, fashioned, shaped by work, studied, cured, soothed, embellished, conditioned after death, represented and depicted in their actual, peculiar social determination. Whose bodies and for what purposes? Numerous aspects of these processes, and the practitioners taking part in them, remain largely unexplored or poorly contextualised. By focusing on objects, texts and techniques, this panel delves into the material history of the construction of the body as an object of knowledge and action. Probing the heuristic virtues of an approach centred on individual bodies, papers seek to shed light on the ways in which material circumstances and intellectual technologies shaped the production of knowledge, while exploring how specific, historical bodies informed, or interfered with, this process.Organized by Maria Pia Donato and Paola Bertucci

Many scientists rely on distributed technologies and organizations that reach between laboratories and provide resources for groups of researchers with shared interests. These might be databases and repositories, newsletters and journals, or even libraries and seminars. They are often tightly cleaved to the communities they serve and produce, and may be thought of as 'community tools'. Community tools also often require dedicated funding and depend on continual negotiation and curation, and in these ways have the potential to constitute and reconstitute communities of researchers. Professional experts, such as curators, animal technicians, librarians, stock keepers, manage and maintain these tools, but their stories have often been neglected in histories of the experimental sciences. This panel brings together four histories of such community tools, paying particular attention to the people who care for, curate and maintain them. We explore how such tools are established-who sets them up, what they gain and what they give up. We examine the labor, creativity and expertise of the people who maintain them, and how these have shaped researchers' lives and practices. We reflect on the ways that community tools have created and stabilized scientific norms and habits. By bringing these stories together we pay attention to maintenance and care-who does it, how they do it, and why-and discuss what these can tell us about the creation and reconstitution of scientific communities.Organized by Jenny Bangham (University of Cambridge) 

Although the importance of Descartes' work for the development of physical science in the pre-Newtonian period has been extensively explored in the literature, the impact of his work on the medical and biomedical sciences has not been examined in the same detail. This has been in spite of the explicit and repeated statements by Descartes that the establishment of a new medicine, built systematically upon his physics, formed a fundamental aim of his whole philosophical project. Acceptance of this medical dimension of Descartes' program requires the re-examination of several issues in our understanding of the genesis, reception, and historical influence of Cartesianism. For beginning with Descartes himself, but extending through the work of Cartesian physicians such as Henricus Regius, Louis de la Forge, and Theodoor Craanen, Cartesianism became a dynamic program for a revolutionary form of biomedical inquiry, one that promised a new research program in the life sciences that would attract enthusiastic followers and ardent critics throughout Europe. This session draws together an international group of scholars who have been directly concerned with these dimensions of Cartesianism. These contributions will explore the background, elaboration, traditional and innovative elements of medical Cartesianism, as well as its evolving public expression, with particular focus on the issues surrounding the production and influence of the posthumous Traité de l'homme and Descartes' other medical works. This session also highlights the interactions of the history of science, medicine and philosophy, and the importance of lesser-known figures in the construction of early modern science and philosophy.Organized by Phillip R. Sloan 

It is well known that scientific images have evoked emotional responses from (to name but a few) wonder to boredom, fear to possessiveness, and puzzlement to mastery. Yet outside certain specific contexts, notably Romanticism and the sublime, historians of science have paid more attention to the visual experiences of popular writers, students and laypeople than to those of researchers, whose efforts to drain observation of emotion have been a more prominent concern. This session proposes to take a more concerted approach to the emotional relations of observational scientists to their research objects. These affective investments encompass long-term attachments to classic images, with their comforting familiarity, and the thrills and spills of discovery. Discovery accounts have celebrated work and skill, but also invoked more complex emotions, especially various kinds of loss. On the one hand, new sights have threatened the status of much-loved pictures and models. On the other, observers tended to worry until confirmation that the putative novelties, if not lost to one accident or another, might themselves be revealed as artefacts. There is a rich field here for the exploration of appropriately historicized observation, discovery, and emotions.Organized by Nick Hopwood

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 when background knowledge already exists relating the two fields." More recently, William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen (2007) also consider how developing models of biological mechanisms "often requires collaborative effort drawing upon techniques developed and information generated in different disciplines." Historians of genetics have certainly noted the importance of intersections of fields (cytology and Mendelism, developmental genetics, the modern synthesis). Nonetheless, such accounts still often follow narratives of a succession of theories, concepts, or methodologies. In our session we wish to work towards a more dynamic view of parallel, merging, and diverging developments. Papers will revisit cross-disciplinary collaborations between scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the use of theories, methods, and approaches of different disciplines-chemistry, biochemistry, cytology, and genetics-to forge new fields and map the disciplinary terrain of heredity studies, and, in so doing, of modern experimental biology.Organized by Marsha Richmond

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 laboratory experiments and livestock industries, to wildlife settings and literary works. More than solely "thinking with animals" (following Derrida), this panel proposes considering human culture from the point of view of animals' material worlds and how humans in turn have attempted to represent animality. Cathy Gere examines animal fables, most prominently The Fable of the Bees by Anglo-Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville, to discuss how stories of non-human animals serve as stand-ins for the human condition. Ana María Gómez López presents fieldwork by German paleontologist Johannes Weigelt in the U.S. Gulf Coast, focusing on how contemporary animal carcasses served as a means to understand fossilization from the distant past. Floor Haalboom reveals the importance of what animals in factory farms eat by analyzing livestock feed as a crucial scientific technology in twentieth century agriculture. Annalena Roters examines animals in contemporary art from a post-humanist perspective as a means to move beyond anthropocentrism. In conclusion, Anne van Veen proposes 'multispecies choreography' as a useful concept for writing about past practices of animal experimentation in a non-anthropocentric manner.Organized by Anne Van Veen

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 professional historians in both fields, neatly separated along the boundaries of the so-called "two cultures" – with the history of nature falling into the realm of science and the history of human culture into the humanities. This panel explores examples and developments that run counter to this standard narrative. We emphasize the persistence of considerable overlap, and trace a continuous process of negotiating and contesting the boundaries between "natural" and "cultural" histories. The first paper (Boom) uses the example of the Brussels naturalist F.X. de Burtin to show how, even in the 1780s, the history of the earth and the history of humanity were seen as shaped by analogous processes. The second paper (Nyhart) enters the nineteenth century, and analyzes the theory of history held by the German botanist and cell theory pioneer M. Schleiden. The third (Krämer) and fourth (Nickelsen) contributions are intimately connected, and investigate how botanists in the late nineteenth century claimed an important role for themselves in the writing of cultural history, culminating in the call for a new concept of "culture" that acknowledged the rising importance of the sciences. The commentary (Müller-Wille) complements the panel's papers and opens the floor for a more general discussion.Organized by Fabian Kraemer and Kärin Nickelsen

Prevailing views cast the Pacific as a desolate, sparsely populated expanse between continents and a blank slate for the assertion of Western epistemological and territorial claims. Burgeoning East Asian scholarship, migration studies and indigenous critical works adumbrate a radically opposed view: of a knotted plurality of translocal and transcultural circuits of knowledge, colonization and competition linking peoples and environments across the Pacific and beyond. Imperial science historiography, meanwhile, has undergone a parallel shift from an application of monolithic national and cultural analytical frameworks toward an emphasis on the contingent translation of knowledges in circulation between peoples and localities. Our panel develops these themes with five case studies exemplifying diverse roles played by science in reifying and resisting situations of dominance in Pacific contexts: transglobal parasite research in the service of Hawaiian agriculture, influenza epidemiology as a catalyst for Hong Kong anticommunism, Fijian reef geology as an emblem of Northern Irish imperial identity, ethnoecology versus American imperial and Southeast Asian nationalist conceptions of indigenous knowledge, and marine biology as a site for the assertion of Nationalist Chinese policy vis à vis Japan. Collectively, we extend the reach of Pacific cultural and informational networks from East and Southeast Asia, through the South Pacific and continental United States, to contexts as far afield as Britain, Ireland and West Africa. We also conceptualize Pacific nations and empires as contested, imagined entities, subject to local political and environmental pressures, and implicated in far-flung trans-oceanic and transglobal concerns.Organized by Geoff Bil

During the early modern period, the mathematical sciences dramatically upgraded its status. It went from having a secondary role and ancillary status in the mid 16th century, up to be considered the most powerful tool of scientific research by the turn of the 18th century. As recognized by a large historiography, these transformations cannot be accounted for in terms of internal developments. It is necessary to look outside universities and scholarly mathematics, taking into account the broader social context, in particular the role of social practices of arithmetic, geometry and metrology. These provided essential impulses that help explain the momentous conceptual and methodological transformations mathematics went through in early modern Europe. Our hypothesis, based on several case studies, is that a general mathematization of civil life took place. Elementary arithmetic and geometry became ubiquitous for merchants, gaugers, architects, instrument-makers and engineers, with growing impact on education practices and far-reaching epistemological consequences. To track this evolution, one can study the material culture of practical mathematics, i.e. objects closely linked to what people socially do, both in the higher court culture and in the artisan's workshops. New literary forms developed, such as practitioners commonplace books, booklets and other forms of modern teaching material, printed metrological tables and comptes faits to make mathematics readily usable. We hope to show that these widespread practices, backed by social and political authority, help explain the success of mathematical values (of precision, "application" of mathematics, computation and forecasting) and of new mathematical concepts (most notably "arithmetical" ratios and proportionality), as well as the changing status of early modern mathematical sciences.Organized by Thomas Morel

During the last decade scholars of international affairs and political scientists along with ambassadors and government officials have extensively focused on the role of diplomacy in settling nuclear issues. Yet, the programmatic separation between science and diplomacy and the instrumental use of science that prevails in diplomatic practice come short in explaining the complex nuclear history. To historians of science it has become clear that international collaborations on nuclear matters have strongly overlapped with diplomatic affairs throughout the second half of the 20th century. This relationship between science and diplomacy has been indeed reciprocal: nuclear knowledge and expertise, as well as access to nuclear technologies, have been used as a diplomatic instrument and have formed diplomatic relations. In return, diplomatic affairs have also shaped the nature of nuclear research: the circulation of knowledge, people and materials has been to a large extent a diplomatic matter. On a national level, political forces have been highly influential in shaping nuclear research infrastructure and nuclear experts have guided governmental policy on nuclear energy issues. This session offers a platform to discuss the various ways in which nuclear science and diplomacy have been co-constructed throughout the history of nuclear energy research. We aim a. to obtain new insights in the interplay of nuclear science and diplomacy and b. to move beyond dominant historiographical perspectives on nuclear energy, which too often revolve around US foreign policy matters and cold war narratives.

The passing of the Society Editorship from Utrecht to Mississippi State University presents an opportunity for those overseeing HSS publications to discuss their work with members, and to highlight the range of ways that members of every career stage and specialization can participate in the publication life of the Society. It is also a chance to discuss, within proper bounds, what goes on in the various HSS editorial offices. Matthew Lavine, on behalf of his co-Editor Alix Hui, will outline their plans for Isis and the integration of digital history projects into our mandate, and invite the membership's participation in new forms of public outreach . Suman Seth will speak about the process of assembling a proposal for Osiris, and will address plans to shorten the production time for each volume. Jay Malone will comment on the origins of the Newsletter, and speak about changes planned in the coming year, including the announcement of a new permanent editor. Stephen Weldon will report on the status of the Cumulative Bibliography, as a print and online resource, and introduce the bibliographic essays that will be featured in forthcoming volumes. Floris Cohen, as outgoing Society Editor, will reflect on two aspects of his experience: the everyday realities of the refereeing process, and the consequences of Isis having been run for five years from outside the Anglophone world. These statements would take 45 minutes, with the balance reserved for questions and commentary from the audience, in particular graduate students and early career scholars.

The Women's Mentorship Event is an informal roundtable discussion that provides participants with a safe space to discuss issues relevant to woman-identifying persons in academia. Questions from participants are encouraged and will help steer the discussion. Mentors at various stages of their academic careers will share their experiences, offer advice, and answer questions. This year's confirmed mentors include:Angela Creager, Princeton UniversityAnita Guerrini, Oregon State University (emerita) and University of California, Santa BarbaraAlexandra Hui, Mississippi State UniversitySally Kohlstedt, University of MinnesotaAnya Zilberstein, Concordia UniversityAll women-identifying persons are welcome to attend.A light lunch will be provided thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous benefactor.Please RSVP to gecc.mentorship@gmail.comby July 20th.If you cannot attend due to a conflict but would be interested in women's mentoring, email gecc.mentorship@gmail.com and we will try to set up a smaller session with one of our faculty. A Graduate and Early Career Caucus EventHSSGECCHSSGECC

AbstractIn the past decades we have seen the introduction of more and more technologies that operate under the surface of the body, including artificial hips, knees and hearts, pacemakers, breast and cochlear implants, prosthetic arms and legs, spinal cord stimulators, and emerging human enhancement technologies. Understanding the agency, vulnerability and resilience of people living with technologies inside their bodies is therefore an urgent issue. Technologies inside bodies challenge a longstanding tradition of theorizing human-technology relations in STS, philosophy of technology, and history of science. For a long time, most theories on human agency, including the work of Bruno Latour and Don Ihde, only addressed technologies external to the body. These theoretical approaches conceptualize the interactions between humans and technologies merely as finite and limited, temporal events and focus on devices that are more or less under the control of humans. Technologies implanted in bodies challenge these approaches to human-technology relations in two different ways. First, these devices are designed in such a way that they delegate no agency to its 'users', in terms of how they are supposed to interact with these technologies. Second, implants involve continuous interactions between human bodies and technologies that may last a whole life time. Understanding the agency, vulnerability and resilience of people living with technologies implanted in their bodies also challenges social studies of cyborgs because this scholarship silences the lived experiences and voices of people living with implants and neglects the materiality of hybrid bodies. In my lecture, I will discuss recent feminist studies on the intimate relationships between bodies and technologies that argue that it is important to re-materialize the cyborg. Based on my current research on pacemakers and implantable defibrillators I suggest that medical implants may best be considered as body-companion technologies. This metaphor invites us to approach technologies implanted in bodies as devices that act as life-long companions that are inextricably intertwined with all aspects of life, including the process of dying. Approaching technologies inside bodies as body- companion technologies draws the attention to the multiplicity of human-technology relations co-constituted by gender, age, and the geo-political landscape.BiographyNelly Oudshoorn is Professor Emerita of Technology Dynamics and Health Care at the University of Twente. Her research interests and publications include the co-construction of technologies and users, with a particular focus on medical technologies. She is the author/co-editor of three award-winning books, including The Male Pill. A Biography of a Technology in the Making ( Duke University Press 2003, awarded with the Rachel Carson Prize 2005 by the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2005; Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare (Palgrave Macmillan 2011, winner of the Book Prize 2012 of Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness of the British Sociological Association); and The New Production of Users: Changing Involvement Strategies and Innovation Collectives, co-edited with Hyysalo and Elgaard Jensen (Routledge 2016, awarded with the Freeman Prize of the European Association for the study of science and technology in 2016). In addition, she is the author of Beyond the Natural Body. An Archeology of Sex Hormones (Routledge 1994) and co-editor of Bodies of Technology. Women's Involvement with Reproductive Medicine ( Ohio State University Press 2000, together with Saetnan and Kirejczyk) and How Users Matter. The Co-construction of Users and Technology (MIT Press, 2003), together with Pinch.

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. Several countries, led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy, moved to deinstitutionalize individuals with mental illness while making alternative forms of care available in the community. It turned out that initiatives in community mental health were insufficient to meet the needs of individuals with mental illness. The critique of mental hospital care was shared by politicians and mental health personnel in several Western countries. The response to this critique, the commencement of deinstitutionalization, the degree to which mental hospital care was maintained, and the development of community mental health services varied significantly between countries. The participants in this panel review developments in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia to gain insights into international variations in the process of deinstitutionalization.Organized by Hans Pols

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 Revolution. However, such a focus hinders our understanding of the broader contours of French science and medicine during this period, which was hardly limited to the Academy: artists, doctors, apothecaries, surveyors, and engineers (to name only a few groups) devoted considerable interest to scientific topics. Further, even academicians or close collaborators of the Academy were usually active in other fields, from the medical marketplace to the Parisian world of publishing. By focusing on the interactions among academicians, collaborators, and what the French call "fellow travelers," this panel aims to examine French science in the period 1650-1750 through studies that tackle academicians, artists, and other mediators as they negotiated the boundaries of the Academy and other formal institutions, such as the Royal Manufactures at the Gobelins. Collectively, we argue, an understanding of the activities of such mediators is crucial for putting into perspective the role of the Academy, and of science more broadly, in French culture and society during the Old Regime.Organized by Oded Rabinovitch

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, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab

The long eighteenth century saw changes in ideas of order not only in politics and society, but also in philosophy, the arts, and natural science. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, the Aristotelian two-sphere cosmology, which for millennia divided a geocentric universe into the earthly and heavenly realms, gave way to a unified and (semi-) mechanized universe. This had momentous and well-studied implications for astronomy and mechanics. Despite this collapse, the eighteenth century inherited old classificatory schemes-e.g. four ancient elements, three kingdoms of nature, subterranean and terrestrial realms-whose boundaries and aims had to be redefined, especially in experimental and natural historical pursuits. This panel examines some of these processes of conceptual, practical, and institutional renegotiation, and the way they played out in some of the most prominent domains of eighteenth-century scientific inquiry like experimental physics, chemistry, pneumatics, geology, and zoology. The papers assembled here, which span the years 1699–1812, examine British, French, German, Dutch, and Russian case studies to show both why old schemes were still useful in organizing and presenting scientific knowledge but also why and how they had to be revised. We explore shifts in classification before and after Linnaeus's binomial system; the development of early atmospheric and meteorological studies; Lomonosov's mineralogical science in the context of 'mining Enlightenment'; and the relations between collections, classificatory systems, and commercial publishing at the close of the eighteenth century.Organized by Victor D. Boantza

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 case studies, which are situated in the nineteenth century, establish links between disciplines as diverse as archaeology and chemistry, physics and historiography, and theology and zoology. These links demonstrate that, even though the late nineteenth century was the period in which the sciences and the humanities came to be defined in distinct terms, it would be wrong to suppose that this prevented scientists and humanists from drawing inspiration from one another's ideals and practices. What is more, we show that scientists and humanists occasionally collaborated on the very same material objects, transferring methods and sharing practices across disciplinary boundaries. In a broader sense, we wish to stimulate further research on the historical relations between the sciences and the humanities which not only acknowledges their differences, but also examines their points of intersection.Organized by Sjang ten Hagen and Josephine Musil-Gutsch

The Session aims at discussing, from different case studies, the importance of global projects in the development of astronomy during the 19th and 20th centuries. The main goal is to reflect about how institutions (astronomical observatories, maritime services, telegraphic and rail offices, etc.) approached locally a whole set of common global problems – from solar parallax in the first half of the 19th century to the "Carte du Ciel", including the problem of time ones, the determination of the prime meridian and the creation of an electrical world map. Another goal is analyzing of how these networks spread from a local-global intersection. Reports from Europe and the US (such as those from the French Bureau des Longitudes and the American Bureau of Navigation), as well as the correspondence and the diaries of astronomers, mostly minimizes and denies the role played by local institutions. This Session aims at making visible such stories. Another objective is to analyze the astronomical enterprises of the period (such as expeditions to observe the transit of planets or total solar eclipses) and the mobility of people and instruments in such global projects. The questions we are looking for are:How do case studies (national, regional, etc.) relate to global networks? What role did play local communities and institutions (observatories, government agencies, amateurs, etc.) in these global networks? How can these networks be studied from a local approach without losing sight of the global meaning they had? How is the globality of science constructed?

Welcome to THATCamp HSS 2019 in Utrecht!We are excited to be able to offer two afternoons of THATCamp at HSS this year. THATCamp will take place on Thursday July 25 and Friday July 26, from 13:30-18:00, with a coffee break at 15:30-16:00. We hope in splitting up THATCamp, interested people can stop by when it is convenient for them, rather than having to set aside an entire day.If you've never attended THATCamp, or "The Humanities and Technology Camp," it is an unconference. An unconference is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.We are looking forward to inviting two keynote speakers, one for each afternoon, to speak on important issues that face the humanities in the use of technology.Our schedule each afternoon will look something like this:keynote + Q/A: 13:30-14:00session 1: 14:30-15:30Break 15:30-16:00session 2: 16:00-17:00session 3: 17:00-18:00Each session will be organized in smaller chunks of time: making the schedule (10 min), then three 15-min. sessions - with breakouts if there are enough people.Please register for THATCampHSS and be sure to propose your topic for a presentation on either day.

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, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab

Ever since the human mind was constituted as an object of science in the late-nineteenth century, its immateriality has remained an enduring stimulus. Curiously, for most of a century, in most of the world, making the human and the mind susceptible to scientific investigations has required the use of a wide range of materials. New material technologies---aidophones, vowel-tracers, phonoscopes, mechanical recording and time-keeping devices, among others---were paired with new methods to produce scientific knowledge across the human sciences, as they professionalized and institutionalized in Europe and North America. While founding experimental psychology, Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt modified technical devices like the stopwatch and metronome in efforts to more scientifically measure mental operations. Between 1870 and 1914, laboratory and field scientists in anthropology, linguistics, and psychology experimented widely with spools of yarn, color chips, illustrated flip books, naturalia, light reflected through plastic sheets, and other sundry measurements of the senses. This panel explores scientific attempts to produce knowledge about the human, the mind, language, and culture at the intersections of the senses. By attending to the material instruments, techniques, and technologies of human sciences circa 1900, this panel sheds light on scientific attempts to materialize the intractably immaterial human mind. By revisiting human sciences like anthropology, linguistics, and psychology around the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on the material conditions and substrata of scientific knowledge production, this panel provides historical material with which to reconsider the historiography of the human sciences more broadly.Organized by Cameron Brinitzer

This panel will address the use of science and technology studies to address particular audiences, re-evaluate perceptions of failed promises, and examine how the history of science and technology can be utilized as a tool for reconsidering the future. Presenters will focus on three case studies: 1) how Space-Age-era mythic visions of a future in outer space should be historically considered alongside the contemporaneous public recognition of the ecological fragility of the planet. These popular culture conceptions of the cosmos will de examined within a context of Space Age materialism and consumerism that led to ecological consequences still today tied into futuristic visions of humanity; 2) the history of 20th century food science and technology in the United States with a focus on its prospective and promissory orientation and the role of consumer rejection in shaping the marketplace and research and development in food science, ultimately questioning the fate of the imagined futures embedded in failed technologies; 3) the importance of a historical analysis of past reform efforts in math and science education in the U.S. as a tool aimed at the specific audience of policymakers to help them better understand the perception of crisis and failure in past reform efforts and using this analysis to inform future educational reforms. These case studies will open a discussion about the goals of science and technology studies, the role of the historian in reaching particular audiences, and the utility/limitations of historical analysis in contemplating the future.

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 practices. In this burgeoning historiographic context, the application of nuclear science in agriculture has hitherto attracted relatively little scholarly attention. In particular, despite the pioneering contributions of Helen Anne Curry, Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Karin Zachmann, the development of mutation breeding in other national contexts different from the United States and, more in general, the global spread of atomic agriculture remain uncharted territory. The aim of this session is to partially bridge this gap, by providing a broader perspective, both geographically and analytically. First of all, the session will examine the transnational dimension of atomic agriculture, drawing attention on little known, yet fundamental, national case-studies, such as Sweden and Italy, but also exploring the transnational circulation of research methods, technological systems, irradiated organisms, from the United States to Europe (and vice versa), as well as from Europe to the Middle East and Central Africa. Secondly, the session will explore the complex interaction between the establishment of mutation plant breeding as a transnational scientific field, on the one hand, and the global geopolitics of atomic agriculture, on the other, involving conflicting actions and relationships between different United Nations' organizations, such as the FAO and the IAEA.Organized by Francesco Cassata

In the first decades of the twentieth century, state administrators helmed organizations historically-unprecedented in their size and degree of centralization. Growing armies of state employees collected taxes; generated and distributed government statistics; administered fitfully-growing welfare programs and, perhaps most saliently, conducted military operations of hitherto-unimaginable scope. The modern enterprise of war required state coordination of millions of combatants and the surveillance of citizens on the battlefield and the home-front alike. This panel explores the place of sound, hearing, and non-hearing in the operations of the twentieth century state, paying particular attention to the contexts of war, surveillance and propaganda. The relationship between twentieth century states and sonic techniques and technologies is unsurprising given the historical contemporaneity of developments in both spheres. Beginning in the late 1800s a panoply of new techniques and technologies arose for the control and communication of sound. Edison's phonograph facilitated the mass reproduction of sounds. Radios and loud speakers expanded exponentially the reach of centrally-produced sounds while the telephone allowed for the instantaneous (and more-or-less private) communication of sonic data across vast expanses. At the same time, new techniques and technologies allowed scientists and technicians to attend to the evolving soundscape in increasingly sophisticated ways. They measured and tested the volume of urban and industrial environments and the acuity and pitch-range of subjects' hearing. All of these developments in the control and measurement of sound attracted the attention-and resources-of the state.Organized by Jacques Vest

What are the narratives that guide the history of science? For sure one of the more recent ones was ‘science in action’, the emphasis on practices and the imperative on studying science as performed. Perhaps not surprisingly, this story has itself a history, which starts in the early 1960s, when the project “Sources for History of Quantum Physics” was established. The main task of Thomas Kuhn’s, John Heilbron’s and Paul Forman’s work, lasting three years, was to interview old heroes of Quantum Mechanics and to archive the spoken word. While giving an account of the project’s history, this talk will focus on analyzing the process of interviewing and characterize its wider context. Not only does their approach offer us important insights into the shaping of the persona of the scientist, it also presents an important step towards the post-Kuhnian way of doing history of science. Photo by Marcin Kłucik

The Women's Caucus of the History of Science Society focuses on the role and status of women in the profession. The caucus serves as a forum for those interested in the history of women, as well as the wider role of gender in science, medicine, and technology. The caucus also helps sponsor and administer the Dependent Care Grants and a nursing mother's room at the annual meeting. The co-chairs of the caucus act as a resource for the History of Science Society on questions pertinent to the role and status of women in the profession and in the Society. We also coordinate a list serve and a Facebook group.All are welcome to attend the Women's Caucus annual breakfast.Women's Caucus Minutes 2018 - Tickets required for this event. Purchase tickets or add them to your existing registration by visiting the registration page.With generous support from Linda Hall Library

Did you attend any GECC events? Did you like them? Or did we bore you to tears? What have we done well and what could we do better? Come to our business meeting and tell us!Are you interested in becoming a part of the GECC team? Come to our business meeting and find out more about GECC and what we do.If you can't make it but would like to provide feedback or learn more about GECC and our activities, e-mail hss.gecc@gmail.com.Graduate and Early Career CaucusHSSGECCHSSGECC

Eighty years ago, in 1939, a radical collective of French mathematicians published the first installment of a monumental effort to rewrite the foundations of mathematics under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki. The Elements de Mathematique, collectively planned, written, and revised, quickly became an icon for a highly influential approach to modern abstract mathematics that found currency and controversy in fields as varied as elementary education, anthropology, art, literature, philosophy, physics, and economics. Bourbaki's collective animators cultivated an atmosphere of mystery and misdirection around their creation, and only a small fraction of the voluminous writing about their project has managed to probe beyond its considerable mythology. Our roundtable discussion brings together several of the scholars who, in the last three decades, have applied detailed historical investigation to forge new understandings of Bourbaki's origins, operations, and legacies. We will discuss recent archival findings and interpretations that significantly revise the prevailing lore about Bourbaki, explaining the project's origins and collective practices in its interwar French contexts, specifying the social and epistemic effects of the group's approach to parody and hoax, and tracing the collaboration's later cultural significance in and beyond France. Our discussion will focus on how historical understandings of Bourbaki have changed, what methodologies and sources have made these changes possible, and what major questions animate current and future scholarship on one of the most famous names of twentieth-century mathematics.Sponsored by the Forum on the History of Mathematical Sciences

This panel explores systems of classification across the many disciplines that constitute the early sciences. It interrogates the particular ways in which historical contexts shaped how natural philosophers, scientific practitioners, and scholars organized and categorized people, plants, nature, and ideas. Juxtaposing perspectives from different times and places that make up the early sciences, the papers question whether early scientific categories allow for meaningful or even valid comparisons between cultures and periods.

The papers in this session recall the intellectually-challenging context in astronomy and astrophysics at the turn of the 20th century, when a wealth of empirical data became available, giving rise to a host of new, and quite puzzling statistical correlations, the reality of which was often deemed uncertain. Several theorists braved the uncertainties, drawing on the new correlations to elaborate models of stellar dynamics, and of the nature and structure of the universe. Inspired by kinetic gas theory, in 1901 William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) calculated the dimensions of the universe based on star velocities in the vicinity of the Solar System, giving rise to "stargas" models of the universe, pursued from various angles by J. C. Kapteyn, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Eddington, Karl Schwarzschild, James Jeans, C. V. L. Charlier, and Albert Einstein, from 1906 to 1924. Meanwhile, new theories of the electron and the atom enabled astronomers to investigate the physical properties of stars and explain many of the new correlations. Both Eddington and Anton Pannekoek took a pragmatic, inquisitive approach: Eddington, in his investigations on the internal constitution of stars, valued gaining physical insight over mathematical rigor, while Pannekoek focused on precision measurements and laborious numerical models to determine the physical conditions in the outer layers of stars. Together, these four talks, based largely on previously-unexploited archival sources, provide a richer picture of the ground-breaking developments in early 20th-century astrophysics and cosmology.Organized by Scott WalterCo-Sponsored by the HSS Physical Sciences Forum and the IUHPST/DHST Commission on the History of Physics

The Forum for the History of Health, Medicine, and the Life Sciences aims to create a venue at the HSS for historians of the medical and life sciences (including nursing, traditional health practices, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, pharmacy etc.) to engage in conversations across disciplinary and chronological boundaries around shared themes and methodological questions. It takes an inclusive approach to its represented area, in order to promote chronological, geographic and thematic diversity and broaden the potential for collaborative interactions. The Forum organizes roundtables and sessions at the HSS, collaborates with societies and associations for the history of medicine to promote cross-meeting interaction, and supports graduate student work with its essay prize.

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 harmful toxins. Chemists, pharmacologists and toxicologists took a correspondingly strong interest in understanding the material underpinnings of these desirable and hazardous properties, which were not only significant in themselves but also provided windows into the relationship between living nature and nonliving or human-made materials during the 19th and 20th centuries. The papers in this panel addresses these sciences of toxins and intoxicants, taking up chemists' efforts to identify, map, and control the action of chemicals on the body, whether in the service of prevention or enhancement. These take place in the various contexts of the courtroom, borrowed hospital laboratories, drug companies, and regulatory agencies. Shared themes include the interplay between pharmacological or toxicological effects and sensory qualities like taste, smell, and appearance, the distinction between natural and artificial chemicals, and the challenge of rendering invisible agents legible.Organized by Theresa LevittSponsored by the Forum on the History of the Chemical Sciences

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 undergraduate education in some form, significant gaps between the profession and the field of K-12 education remain. This roundtable session will provide a venue to discuss new opportunities for engagement and collaboration between historians of science and educators at all levels, with a focus on new media and expanding initiatives in middle and high school teacher training. It will explore the variety of ways that historical perspectives can enrich science teaching––by providing compelling narratives; by demonstrating the methods and nature of science; by building cross-curricular connections; by humanizing scientists and addressing issues of diversity in STEM; and by exploring the ethics, values, and social context of science. This roundtable includes participants involved in science education efforts in the private (CrashCourse) and government (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State) sectors, as well as academia (UTeach). Participants will share their experiences both in the classroom and in developing film and online resources to transfer the insights of the history of science beyond the profession.Sponsored by the Committee on Education and Engagement

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. These papers are based on printed materials in Urdu, Bengali and Hindi – three regional languages widely used across the subcontinent and often associated with distinct communities of religion and knowledge, Muslims and Hindus. Together these papers provide dense case-studies of the reception, translation and reconfiguration of scientific knowledge in a multilingual colonial context with pre-existing knowledge communities and longstanding intellectual traditions. The panel engages with an existing geography within the historiography of science in the British empire, which has London and Calcutta as its centers, by situating its inquiries in the cities of Aligarh, Allahabad and Hyderabad, and their attendant cultures of knowledge. These case-studies aim to demonstrate the cultural embeddedness of knowledge production; the interactions between categories of science and religion; and the importance of language and translation to the global circulations of scientific discourse.Organized by Sarah QidwaiSponsored by the Forum for the History of Science in Asia

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 translation of knowledge between the West and Africa. This panel brings together such trends by examining scientific cultures in twentieth-century south and east Africa. Panellists examine how African knowledge shaped sleeping-sickness research and tropical medicine in the Lake Victoria region; how Zulu knowledge was mobilised as evidence for and against animal-trypanosomiasis control strategies in Zululand; how medical cartographers studying Burkitt's lymphoma configured Uganda as a centre for medical research; how the construction of Standard Swahili, intended as a tool of colonial power, became the language of Tanganyikan nationalism; and how educational computer technologies in Nairobi schools offered a path to economic growth, yet perpetuated colonial hierarchies. Our papers show that Africans not only served as sources of field data for scientists, but often provided foundations for scientific theories. Likewise, the 'tools of empire' were sometimes turned upon their creators: scientific projects had unintended consequences and exposed the limits of colonial dominion. This would have lasting impacts after decolonisation, where scientific institutions were transformed into centres of national development. Together, these papers attempt a different reading of scientific cultures in Africa, showing how science could both oppress and empower, and how local and foreign forms of knowledge-making interacted and influenced one another.Organized by Jules Skotnes-Brown

"It's a match!" To date, the phones of 91 million persons around the globe have already buzzed with these words – the opening salvos of courtship in the world of online dating. Yet what, precisely, is a "match"? Behind the multi-billion-dollar dating industry stand programmers and statisticians seeking to bring, in the words of OkCupid's Christian Rudder, "mathematically-minded … analysis and rigor to what had historically been the domain of love 'experts' and grinning warlocks like Dr. Phil." Far from a hot-headed discourse of the passions, the "match" is about cool-headed engineering: the concepts and practices for sorting personal information and targeting individuals from among larger populations. The history of the "match" is a history of knowledge. Elena Serrano examines how early-eighteenth-century theories of the female body taught men to distinguish, from outward traits and gestures, between "physical" and "moral" love. Carla Bittel uncovers the role of phrenologists as experts in the marital marketplace, detailing the creation of cranial "profiles" to aid in selecting partners. Hansun Hsiung explores Charles Fourier's "calculus of passions," asking why the mathematization of partnership formed an essential component of utopian socialism. Erika Milam traces how the evolutionary study of same-sex behavior in animals initially naturalized heterosexual courtship norms but transformed into a defense of gay rights. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, from humoral medicine and phrenology to mathematics and evolutionary biology, this panel explores the shifting sciences that have promised solutions to courtship, guaranteeing the "congeniality" and "harmony" of partners' bodies and minds.Organized by Hansun Hsiung and Elena SerranoSponsored by the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences 

The GECC Tacit Knowledge Series brings together established scholars with a wide array of experiences and expertise in order to discuss an array of topics that are important to junior scholars and that are difficult to learn about independently or without prior experience.Inspired by this year's conference location, the 2019 theme is "Academic Internationalisms." Our panelists discuss a range of topics ranging from the structure of post-docs and faculty positions to grant applications and professional norms. Come with questions of your own, or simply an open mind! This year's panellists are: Projit Mukharji (Penn) Lisa Onaga (Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science) Ahmed Ragab (Harvard)Willemijn Ruberg (Utrecht) Jim Secord (Cambridge)Graduate and Early Career CaucusHSSGECCHSSGECC

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The Earth and Environment Forum is a lively group of scholars interested in histories of knowledge about the land, sea, and sky, and in all manner of physical, human, and life sciences as they have been practiced outdoors, in transit, or on a global scale. We share a long tradition of helping to welcome students into the discipline, and we warmly encourage any interested parties to join us for our annual get-together at HSS. At these meetings we make introductions between scholars, renew friendships, and hear updates about ongoing work in the history of the environmental and earth sciences.

The business meeting of the Forum for the History of the Chemical Sciences will take place immediately after its sponsored session at this year's HSS. All with interests in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and related fields are warmly welcome to attend.

The Collections, Archives, Libraries, and Museums (CALM) Caucus aims to provide a space for scholars interested in the history of collection-based institutions or efforts to mobilize collections to explore the history of science, technology, and medicine in new and creative ways. The CALM Caucus will also serve as a venue where experienced professionals can provide guidance and support to scholars seeking to pursue careers as curators, librarians, or archivists. In this organizational meeting, the CALM Caucus will focus on gauging broader interest in these topics and how best to address them at future HSS conferences.

The British natural philosopher John Herschel (1792–1871) remains a paradoxical figure in the historiography of modern science: simultaneously recognized as pivotal in the development and professionalization of modern science while curiously under-examined. Herschel's career spanned fields from astronomy to chemistry and optics to the first writings in English on scientific methodology (his 1831 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy) at a period in which these fields were first becoming professionalized. He had leadership roles in the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Society, and BAAS, while his popular textbooks were translated into dozens of languages and were the means by which a new reading public formed their views on science and its practice. His investigations in large part defined what it meant to "do science" throughout the Victorian period. This panel offers the opportunity to recontextualize Herschel's work and discuss recent scholarship on Herschel and remaining questions. Herschel's influence during his lifetime, his extensive published corpus, and the immense amount of surviving correspondence and archival materials make him an important means of investigating a wide array of issues of interest to historians of science. In this panel, participants will briefly summarize their recent scholarship on Herschel with an eye to discussion on avenues for using Herschel's life to address broader scholarly questions and themes. One goal of the panel will be to catalyze interest and generate new approaches in advance of a planned conference on John Herschel to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death in 2021.

The Early Science Forum welcomes anyone with an interest in the early sciences. Come and join us to network and discuss the group's activities.

This roundtable asks how politics and methodology operate in interrelations between Science Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies, as well as in conversations with other Area Studies. The panel's participants engage Women's, Jewish, German, and Chinese Studies, but we will, together with the audience, be concerned with a range of geography-, language-, ethnicity-, and subjectivities-based Area Studies. We wish to continue the lively debate about queerness in/at HSS conducted during recent meetings by bringing in a further set of interlocutors. Howard Chiang provides perspectives from Chinese Studies, drawing on recent global history of sexual/queer science and on questions of how China's global empire intersects with the peripherality of gender and sexual expressions. Rebecca Epstein-Levi discusses rhetorical and moral functions of science and medicine from the perspective of Jewish Studies, examining how modern Jewishness is frequently construed as "somehow queer" and underlies claims of Jews' sexual, and moral, health. Stephanie Dick explores how discussions in the field of Expert Systems de facto reject tacit/embodied/situated knowledges. Drawing on Women's Studies and feminist epistemology, she discusses political implications of this ideal of disembodied knowledge by asking about the privileges of "those who get to not have bodies." Heidi Voskuhl's contribution revolves around engineers' class anxieties in the industrial age, asking how the development in German/Literary Studies of Critical Theory has helped make visible marginalization and oppression on a large scale, and whether and how this type of "Theory" has enabled political expression in Science Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, and beyond.

The 2019 Physical Sciences Forum Distinguished Speaker is Helge Kragh, who will be speaking on "The Very Small and the Very Large: Interdisciplinary Aspects of the History of Physics." In many contexts the term "history of the physical sciences" is more appropriate than the more narrow "history of physics." There are and have for a long time been important connections between physics and related fields such as astronomy, chemistry and geology. The historical study of how the sciences of the heavens gradually established close contacts to atomic, nuclear and particle physics is particularly rewarding. By means of select examples the talk will focus on this process as it mainly evolved through the twentieth century and eventually resulted in so-called physical cosmology. The contributions of physical chemistry and geochemistry are less known, but they too were important in the development of the modern view of the universe.

Between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, contributions to knowledge about nature depended on correspondence networks as a means for exchanging information, ideas, and specimens. The importance of these networks to the most eminent figures in science has been widely acknowledged. Much attention has been paid to their cultivation of style, construction of personae, and conformity to set formulae for corresponding knowledge through the medium of the letter. This panel will explore some lesser known sites and actors. To do so, we consider the materiality of correspondence as a global practice. By framing letters as material objects, we locate letters and correspondence networks in continuous relationship to other spatial entities, in line with recent work on the geographies of books and other paper documents. We pay attention to the physical page, the use of postage stamps to pay for scientific labour, the mobilisation of botanical specimens for self-presentation, and the value of pencil and ink diagrams for communicating observations. We consider the nature of correspondence itself in shaping scientific disciplines and explore how it may help us integrate the histories of excluded groups. We look across different areas of science, from botanical knowledge to phrenology, and at different social contexts and genders, to interrogate the coherence of scientific correspondence practices. It is by taking seriously the places of paper, we argue, that we may investigate more fully the porosity of borders in science.Organized by Laura Brassington

Transhumanists predict that people will achieve immortality by 2045. While this quest for eternal life has been omnipresent in human history, early modern physicians, philosophers, and lay people particularly strove to identify the key to overcoming death. Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment changing aesthetics, new approaches to old texts, and the rise of the New Science opened the door to a wide array of theories and experiments concerning longevity. This period offers intriguing insights into ideas and practices for improving one's body and beauty, for living healthily, and possibly even for defying death. This panel brings scholars working on different aspects of the connected histories of death and long life into conversation about continuities and innovations in life extension in the early modern period.Organized by Vitus Huber and Hannah Marcus

The panel explores different cases of the transnational scientific communication and cooperation involving the two competing Cold War blocks as well as the agents in-between. Socialist countries deemed the transnational and, in the context of the Cold War, trans-ideological scientific communication necessary as a means of acquiring technology while at the same time seeing it as an opportunity to showcase the successes of the socialist science and medicine, thus potentially influencing the Third world. Going beyond the notion of one-way transfer of ideas and technology, the papers will address the nuanced strategies employed in specific attempts to (re)position socialist science and medicine globally: from Michael DeBakey's surgery-as-diplomacy efforts aimed at a better understanding of the Soviet Union and China by the United States, Hungarian socialist engagement in international health linking the Second and Third world, and an unlikely Yugoslav-American alliance aimed at containing the spread of Lysenkoism in the 1950s.Organized by Vedran Duancic

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 climatological mapping will present a variety of approaches towards the representation of natural phenomena in space. The papers collectively will form a comparative approach to mapping, by exploring different attitudes towards a seemingly ubiquitous practice. Maps have often been regarded as embodiments of power that could be transferred to the possessor, or as the means by which to shape the way in which scientific knowledge was generated, transmitted, and understood. However, the papers will show that mapping was not always an obvious way to represent or manipulate knowledge, nor did it unambiguously confer authority on its practitioners. By exploring the use of maps in different scientific disciplines and periods, the waxing and waning of the power and value of maps, and the skills of their producers and owners, this session aims to open up a discussion of the historicity of mapping as a scientific practice.Organized by Anne Secord

This session brings together papers that show how interactions with Latin American environments shaped scientific practices over three centuries, spanning the colonial and independent period. They discuss how a variety of scientific practices intersected with understandings of landscapes and environments (both natural and anthropogenic). They focus on a variety of practitioners, including pilots, natural historians and geographers in the early modern Spanish empire, and archaeologists and botanists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Papers show that local traditions as well as scientific practitioners, based 'in the field' or in scientific or political institutions far removed from this context, contributed to understandings of these environments. Concrete interactions with the landscape and imaginary environmental constructs, in turn, also came to shape scientific practices. All these papers focus on environments that have been singled out throughout history as 'extreme' in their remoteness, aridity or tropicality, and came to be part of an archetypal canon of Latin American nature in European science: the land- and sea-scapes of 18th-century Patagonia, the remote (yet strategically vital) landscape of Paraná, the often-arid environments of South America's west coast, and the agricultural landscapes of Central America. However, they have rarely been considered a factor in the making of scientific knowledge. Instead, they have been assumed to be a passive object of scientific enquiry, rather than a key factor in the interaction between science, society and politics.Organized by Sophie Brockmann

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 Enlightenment to the twentieth century, using the history of science as a lens for viewing past moments in what has been called universal or "big" history, and exploring the interplay among science, history, and historiography: in the writings of mathematician and philosopher Condorcet, who applied the predictive capacity of hypotheses in natural history to the study of human history and its futures; in the work of Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, whose "geno-geography" crossed not only physical and political boundaries, but disciplinary ones as well; and in the new popular histories of Africa and the world written in the 1960s, which capitalized on the most recent developments in palaeoanthropology, and in so doing, obscured a very large joint historiographical and scientific tradition that had previously placed the origins of humanity somewhere else. How have scientific developments inspired new historical narratives or new historiographic practices? How have historians drawn on scientific sources when expanding their narratives beyond their present and into the far horizons of the human future? What happens to these histories when the science underpinning them is called into question, or replaced by an alternate theory?Organized by Emily Kern

The expedition-as a knowledge practice and social organisation-was a fundamental way in which Europeans sought to understand the new and unknown for much of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For historians, published expeditionary narratives are challenging sources to work with: not only were they often aimed at stoking imperial designs or titillating European readers (with exotic stories of heroic adventures, cannibalism and sorcery), but they also provided an account of fieldwork that was often too clean, too focussed on European agents, and all too optimistic about the capacity of their methodologies to guarantee access to knowledge of different places and peoples. This panel seeks to decentre expedition narratives by examining the actual practices of scientific expeditions-from the practice of notetaking to the mobilisation of colonial infrastructures and the complex appropriation of Indigenous knowledges. It is these everyday practices and larger structures that shaped and leant authority to the knowledge produced as much as appeals to normative theories in narratives written after-the-fact. The three papers in this session focus on German and Dutch expeditions to British India, South-East Asia and the South Pacific from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. To throw fresh light on expeditionary science in a non-European settings, these case studies provide new perspectives on expeditionary practices by focusing on less well-known figures, drawing on original archival research, and making use of non-Western sources where available.Organized by Daniel Midena

Welcome to THATCamp HSS 2019 in Utrecht!We are excited to be able to offer two afternoons of THATCamp at HSS this year. THATCamp will take place on Thursday July 25 and Friday July 26, from 13:30-18:00, with a coffee break at 15:30-16:00. We hope in splitting up THATCamp, interested people can stop by when it is convenient for them, rather than having to set aside an entire day.If you've never attended THATCamp, or "The Humanities and Technology Camp," it is an unconference. An unconference is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.We are looking forward to inviting two keynote speakers, one for each afternoon, to speak on important issues that face the humanities in the use of technology.Our schedule each afternoon will look something like this:keynote + Q/A: 13:30-14:00session 1: 14:30-15:30Break 15:30-16:00session 2: 16:00-17:00session 3: 17:00-18:00Each session will be organized in smaller chunks of time: making the schedule (10 min), then three 15-min. sessions - with breakouts if there are enough people.Please register for THATCampHSS and be sure to propose your topic for a presentation on either day.

The Committee on Education and Engagement (CoEE) invites members interested in issues related to education and engagement to discuss ongoing plans.Learn more about us by visiting our Facebook group.

Historians of science have explored the many ways in which 1960s radicalism disrupted the discipline of science. More recently, historians have begun to look at the 1970s as its own distinct era of transformation, one characterized as an "age of fracture" and "the great shift," in the words of Daniel Rogers and Bruce Schulman. At this time, movements for racial and gender equality, social justice, and for decolonization evolved, while new patterns of culture, geopolitics, and social activism emerged. The proposed panel will examine the ways in which scientists of Western Europe and the United States both reacted to and participated in the dramatic changes of the 1970s. The three papers reflect a scientific community rooted in social activism by the 1970s. Sarah Bridger analyzes three working scientists who also, through their work, lived out the ideals of racial and gender equality as well as a critique of materialism. Alison Kraft's case study looks at the antinuclear scientists of Pugwash, who adapted their agenda to address Third World development when Cold War détente made their arms control efforts mostly obsolete. Paul Rubinson discusses the eagerness with which U.S. scientists joined the broader human rights movement of the 1970s and in the process solidified the connection between U.S. interests and scientific internationalism. Scientists in the 1970s embraced the concept of social responsibility and through their actions they addressed the changes of the 1970s, efforts that also exposed their work to politicization and backlash that would emerge in the 1980s. Organized by Paul Rubinson

History of science education remains a marginalized topic, if not a neglected one, or is seen as a separate discipline apart from the history of science. This is despite the fact that science teaching and learning at all levels from primary education to university constitutes a substantial portion of scientific activity. Science education, we argue, must be understood as being integral to scientific practice when we study the development of science and its place in global society. We present a variety of practices in science education across geographical regions in our session. We begin with a paper on the introduction of science education through the Bachelor of Science degree in American Catholic colleges during the nineteenth century. Moving to the University of Edinburgh during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the next presentation focuses on the role of scientific instruments in science education in its Natural Philosophy Department. Instruments and material cultures of science are also central to our third talk, which investigates the transformation and adaptation of research instruments for teaching purposes drawing on a number of historical examples. The final presentation discusses conflicts encountered in the transfer of teaching practices in engineering education from Germany to postcolonial India. Together, our presentations will open for discussion the different meanings of practice in science teaching, from useful education to material practices and skill development across various contexts.Organized by Dana Freiburger and Roland Wittje

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 practices, which ensures the commensurability of discourses and procedures. However, what if a Babylonian confusion befalls institutions? How do they ensure meaningful operation when having to mediate between two or more languages, which also involves shifts in the hierarchies of values, skills, means of verbal, visual, and numerical representation, and various branches of terminologies? The institutional politics of neologisms intervenes with matters of cultural identity and participates in scientific, technological, and pedagogical discussions. This panel will explore the translation of pre-modern knowledge about nature across lingual and cultural domains, and will focus on what is "gained in translation" in terms of negotiating and advancing different kinds of normativity, while pre-modern institutions were employing various verbal, numerical, visual, and material formats to cope with translations. By looking into the translation-related normativity within organizational frameworks we seek to clarify how the routines of translation helped fine-tune the functionality of knowledge in transfer. We will zoom in on themes in translation on a global scale and at several types of the early modern institutions of science, technology, and power in order to discuss the systematic issues of translation that manifested themselves at the early stages of global institutional developments.Organized by Maria Avxentevskaya

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 substance, and cultural understandings of breath and breathing as a component of what it means to be human. Efforts to analyze, measure, and manipulate the aerial environment have frequently engaged historians of science, who have ably analyzed the medical history of respiration and the emergence of pneumatic chemistry and medicine. This session proposes to further this work both chronologically and thematically. The first paper will discuss how prison reform in the mid-eighteenth century focused on the need for improved ventilation technology and architecture. The second paper will examine the role of air in the sanitary reform of naval hospitals, emphasizing the role of female nurses. The third paper will highlight how later nineteenth-century ideas about the practical and commercial uses of air mirrored discussions surrounding "invisible fluids" like electricity. The final paper will examine the controversy surrounding medical ventilators, whose method of forcing air into an unconscious body was accepted for animals long before it was accepted for human beings. This session brings together scholars of early modern and modern science, medicine, and technology in order to illuminate how air and the aerial environment was implicated in discourses surrounding discipline and reform, gender and the body, and the boundary between animal and human.Organized by Paul Sampson

Despite extensive work on the history of medical instruments, the material turn has been slow to arrive in the history of medicine. Paradoxically, the materiality of medical objects and their practices is inseparable from their function. Designed to enact and control the violation of corporeal and psychological boundaries and autonomy, these objects, in turn, embody assumptions about the actors who use them and the bodies they are used upon. The four papers in this panel contribute to the growing field of material cultures studies in the history of medicine. Ranging from nineteenth-century anatomical models to mid-twentieth-century psychological tests, late twentieth-century diabetes management apparatus, and contemporary medical museum exhibition strategies, they illustrate the diversity and potential of material culture studies in the history of medicine and a variety of approaches to studying medical artifacts. Central to all is an investigation of the ways that material medical artifacts and the practices that surround them communicate knowledge that cannot be expressed in other ways, whether implicitly through embodied social hierarchies and user assumptions, or actively, through intentionally engaging users in object-mediated dialogues. As these papers show, medical objects are not only interfaces that mediate and structure relationships between actors, but, through their physical-boundary transgressing nature, they are effect-generating actors themselves.Organized by Elizabeth Neswald

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 by the object lessons of particular material entities. Natural history does not simply involve practices of collecting or ordering of minerals, plants and animals, but is also suggestive of larger histories of nature and ecological relationships. The study of specific natural objects has often stimulated naturalists to rethink or rewrite the histories of nature they tell. The session looks in particular at how the pursuit of the simplest forms of life-algae, infusoria, fungi, phytoplankton-have prompted such rethinkings and rewritings. Living at the boundaries of the living world, often defying classification as plants or animals, the simplest animate beings have been found to offer complex stories about natural history. From the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first century, simple living beings have provided important object lessons for our understandings of the natural world.Organized by Joan Steigerwald