Abstracts Archive

During the past two years, the internet seems to have taken a turn toward the occult (a term which, in its original incarnation, simply referred to concealed knowledge). The darkly conspiratorial mindset of contemporary digital culture is not entirely new, however. In this paper, I explore a set of ...

Inspired by the ability of hormones to regulate metabolism, some medical researchers tried to realize the dream of human “rejuvenation” in the early 20th century. In 1920, Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) claimed to have found a scientific way to rejuvenate human bodies in a procedure he dubbed “t...

This paper explores efforts to apply economic logic to human life. In U.S. federal regulatory agencies, government planners and policy makers have spent over a century trying to devise a scientifically sound way to measure the economic value of lives lost or saved by public programs. The methods the...

 Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is required reading in high school and college classes, and those who read past the first chapter know that the book is based in part on his sociological research in Georgia and elsewhere. Moreover, it has recently been demonstrated by Earl Wright II and ...

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of the efforts of Durkheim and his colleagues to institutionalize sociology as a scientific research discipline in France in the late nineteenth century: the graduate training of the emerging sociologists. This training posed several challenges at its inceptio...

General linguistics is notoriously difficult to position in either the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences departments. This is mirrored in historical debates, which were especially prominent between 1880 and 1930, when linguists were discussing methodological issues in order to define ...

My paper will focus on the career of the Hindi Scientific Glossary (1906), an artefact of nationalist knowledge making and the global circulation of western science from early-twentieth century South Asia. A bilingual lexicon containing Hindi equivalents for English scientific terms, the Glossary wa...

On the night of June 16, 1933, Dr. Haim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency was shot while strolling along a Tel Aviv beach with his wife. Speculation was rife concerning the identity of the murderers: was this a sexual assault or robbery attempt or was this a political...

I discuss the emergence and early history of the concept ‘fact’ in German learned culture around 1800, particularly in physics and historiography. I argue that the fact-oriented methods of German physicists and historians were of common historical origin, by showing that the concept ‘fact’ w...

The Logic Theory Machine (LT) has been described as “The First Artificial Intelligence Program” (Crevier, 1993). LT was a proto-computer-program developed at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in 1955-56. It was designed by Herbert Simon, Allan Newell, and J. Clifford Shaw (hereaft...

The premature death of James Prinsep (1799-1840) was a massive loss to the British Orientalist community. In his twenty years in India his work was united by a common theme: coins. His role as Assay Master saw him perfect ways of measuring both high temperatures and precise weights, and his Indologi...

The Science Service, a news agency for the popularization of science, was established in 1921 by newspaper magnate, E.W. Scripps and scientist William E. Ritter. In 1929 the Service hired a young female writer, Marjorie Van de Water, to cover social science for its Science News-Letter and ...