Abstracts Archive

Objectivity has often been used to refer to an ideal of scientific representation, facilitated by precise measurements and standardized instrumentation. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, clinical and research programs attempted to measure difference in human bodies and minds. Quantitati...

This session explores the intersection of geology and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The questions we pursue are: How did scientists use information from one time-period or region to infer features of another, distant, time period or region? How did they determine which questions were worth...

Concern with the body, both human and animal, animated natural inquiry across the medieval and early modern periods. This panel brings together historians of premodern science and medicine in order to explore the ways in which definitions of the ideal body were socially constructed, received, enforc...

 This panel will explore three episodes of potential radiation exposure among indigenous group in the far north during the twentieth century. We aim to better understand Cold War anxieties about nuclear radiation and the relationship between outside experts and indigenous peoples living in contamin...

This session explores quantification, measurement, accuracy, and precision at the intersection of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Past historiography has tended to associate this cluster of notions with the natural sciences. We suggest that, historically, several humanistic disciplines shared...

China has often been treated as a peripheral or isolated case in the history of science. This panel challenges such narratives of separateness and instead explores the ways in which science in China has been linked and integrated into wider international currents and transnational networks. It does ...

When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time? ...

Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience.  Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience.  Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensio...

With the commercial and colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the early modern world, European missionaries played an important role in the interactions with indigenous peoples around the globe. In the course of the interactions, European missionaries intentionally (and uninten...

In 1967, Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso published their classic work Dependency and Development in Latin America.  "Western" investment, far from placing Latin American nations on a path to progress, had created dependent nations struggling to chart their own path, stunting attempts...

This panel aims at shedding light on a relevant field of the history of science: botany. The study of plants remained generally immersed in collections of items or in the work of apothecaries, or displayed a secondary role in scientific knowledge. Although this picture has never been properly engage...

This session examines reproductive health as a historical site of meaning-making, cultural anxieties, and contested medical and scientific authority. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reproduction gained new salience as an object of medical oversight and intervention. This attention frequen...

The century from 1840 to 1940 was a watershed moment in the global history of science, marked by infrastructural, technological, and political changes that transformed the culture and circulation of knowledge production. It was a time when forensic expertise turned dead bodies into juridical subject...

In the contemporary world, regulating drugs, food products, consumer goods, and occupational hazards requires evidence. The basis on which such evidence should be considered reliable and valid gets to the heart of authoritative knowledge production. In mixed settings of regulatory bodies—a conflue...

 In place-based science, location is key to scientific inquiry.  Thus, place-based science expands the focus from the rituals of laboratory practices within a laboratory to the actual placement of research in a landscape, on parcels of land often controlled by governmental or corporate entities. Â...

Telling scientific stories is a multispecies affair. Non-human animals have been instrumental to studies of the world’s natural order, as model organisms for the human body, as experimental objects, as livestock to be cared for, and as theoretical proxies for human social organizations. Furthermor...

As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, n...

The history of science is full of queer potential. Reassessing what’s considered natural, interrogating supposedly self-evident ontologies, challenging a split between knowledge and power—these are tasks and commitments often shared by history of science and queer scholars alike. Yet, specifical...

Beginning in the 19th century, Chinese agricultural, sericultural, and medical experts worked to adapt scientific knowledge and technology to local and indigenous contexts throughout Asia and the world.  Using tropes of circulation, transplantation, cosmopolitanism, and networks, each of the papers...

Historians of science have recognised that scientists use narrative in many different fields and different domains - not just in the most obvious domains of the natural historical sciences, or in development stories, but in accounting for reactions, in describing mechanisms, in making sense out of s...

Theater and science have been, and continue to be, entangled. It is telling, for example, that the most produced playwright in the USA during the 2017-2018 season was Lauren Gunderson, who specializes in plays based on narratives from the history of science. We, as historians, also engage with ...

Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective sto...