Abstracts Archive

In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, Albert Einstein described the pedagogical value of HPS, expressing his concern that “[s]o many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.” While he was responding...

In recent decades, scholars have shed light on the coalescence and professionalization of the human sciences in a variety of national and transnational contexts, raising intriguing questions about power and resistance. Historians of social science in Latin America have exposed, for example, how the ...

Following Nancy Stepan’s path-breaking study of Latin American eugenics (1992), two generations of historians have continued to investigate the history of biomedicine, psychology, anthropology and other social sciences in the region. And yet many topics remain unexamined. The purpose of this round...

This roundtable is based on the contention that the history of biology stands to benefit from active collaborations with life scientists. Historians of chemistry and molecular biology have advanced similar views in recent years, incorporating both experimental reconstructions and ethnographies into ...

Academic journal publishing faces more challenges and opportunities than ever before. This roundtable brings together editors from journals focusing on history and/or philosophy of biology to reflect on where journal publishing in these subfields is headed, how their outlets are contributing, and ho...

Can flavor be measured? This roundtable will trace the quantification, creation, and destruction of flavor by technoscientific institutions like the US military, the flavor industry, and by neuroscientists fixated on understanding how humans taste. Following Steven Shapin’s call for increased atte...

This roundtable explores several key issues relating to communicating the history of science beyond the community of historians. Historians of science typically report on scientific research, largely for an audience of other historians. Some have reached larger audiences, of course, but those w...

Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN AR-SA Histories of science are traditionally plotted on chronologies that explain the rise of modern European science. These chronologies, even when globalized, have foregrounded the privileging of European history and provided justificatory narratives for colo...

Historians of science are notoriously critical of their subjects. We despise hagiography and critique commemoration. We rightly have exposed and condemned those who have used the power of science to oppress other people. But history of science, as a discipline, is also notorious for its whiteness, b...

Psychographic profiling of millions of Facebook users by data firm Cambridge Analytica is a watershed event in the history of digital technology’s social impact -- the moment when the co-development of the psychological and computational sciences became a matter of public concern. Through the appl...

One of our favorite ways to improve as teachers is to talk to great teachers to hear about what they do in the classroom and how they think about it. That’s just the kind of conversation we hope to engender in this roundtable. Four teachers will get the dialog started by sharing their experiences...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whil...

Papers in this roundtable explore the nature of “Early Science” as a term and a discipline that is ultimately defined and limited by its chronological boundaries, while at the same time wide-ranging in its scope. What exactly do we mean by Early Science? How early – and conversely how late –...

Contemporary geographies and their histories are connected to debates around immigration that are ingrained in the ethnonationalist views of racial difference and purity. From apartheid walls, isolated ghettos, enclosed reservations, to the sinking bodies of dead immigrants in the Mediterranean, the...

Over the last decade, historians, sociologists, and biologists have identified new strains of eugenic thought and practice. In 2014, Amrita Pande depicted the global surrogacy market using the bodies of Indian women as a form of “neo-eugenics.” More recently, Robert Pollack warned Science reader...

As scientific objects and practices acquired a privileged status within the history of science, the field's relationship with the neighbouring disciplines of history of ideas and intellectual history has become more strained. In recent years, several of its most prominent practitioners have encourag...

 The fields of the History of Science and Environmental History have both staked their professional inquires on the assumption that science attempts to know nature. Yet new work in both fields has raised new questions. If there are eras and places in which the concept of nature did not even exist, ...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whi...

All historians of science engage in storytelling. But what about when the science we investigate is itself a science of stories? Examples of narrative abound in natural history, geology, psychology, and in knowledge practices common to many sciences, such as modelling or diagrams. Examining the terr...