Abstracts Archive

Be-hi ka-li (Umbellularia californica) is a hardwood tree native to California and southwestern Oregon with the potential to be a more widely valued source of a chocolate-like superfood in the future. Its nut is a nutrient-dense food and the leaves have many medicinal properties. Known by numerous d...

In the 1970s, governments worldwide vastly expanded their pre-market review of chemical data, and with it the need for toxicological testing. Previously, such review was only required for products intended to have biological effects, such as drugs and pesticides. Legislators and regulators weighed c...

My work encompasses various digital humanities projects on the representation of urban space in early Boston. I will discuss the tools I used for this project, and the promising applications of digital humanities tools to better understant environmental history and the history of science as a whole....

The paper will revisit the history of conceptual change regarding the role of genes in development, by exploring the methodology of analyzing narrative practices in research publications. Historians of biology have analyzed the role of metaphors: “field”, “information”, “program” and oth...

 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, ...

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...

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...

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...

With the advent of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), many Chinese academic, industrial, and government scientists felt compelled to use their expertise to respond to national need and to contribute their talents to the national military and economic development efforts that were taking place in pre...

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...

In 1906, English neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington published 'The Integrative Action of the Nervous System' describing how animal movement was built up from the interaction of reflex arcs, which were unit mechanisms of the nervous system. This is widely regarded as a seminal work heralding m...

In investigating how particular organisms became standard objects of scientific study, historians have tended to focus on the role of particular research communities (Kohler 1994) or institutions (Rader 2004) in these processes. More difficult to conceptualize are the forces shaping scientific organ...

Economics and the life sciences have long shared an interest in population, but in the early 1970s the status of that object changed. Whereas Malthus and his followers treated population growth as an exogenous, iron force pressing in on economics, and whereas neoclassical economists simply bracketed...

From 1949 to 1958, Chinese scientific associations, including the All-China Federation of Natural Science Societies and the All-China Association for Science Popularization, acted as one of diplomatic canal to unite potential partners and fight opponents among the isolation around the world. There w...

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars such as Aris Sarafianos have become increasingly interested in...

The history of biology in Mexico has focused largely on showing the impact that theories like Charles Darwin's had during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Recently, there has been an attempt to broaden the scope of this research by highlighting the impact of other visions such as those like H...

Feminist and decolonial historians of science have learned to ask “who gets to be a reliable knower of technical knowledge?” In this paper, I ask who gets to be a reliable knower and practitioner of science studies. I focus on the fiction of Michael Crichton who came of age as undergraduate and ...

Popular Science was a pictorial published in Shanghai from 1933, which drew readers in with colorful covers and abundant use of images. Many of its images came from foreign popular scientific publications, alongside locally-made photos and illustrations. Why were certain images changed and adapted, ...

How does scientific knowledge gain authority in relationship to other ways of knowing? Standard narratives of modernity assume that science expands through secularization; as scientific facts and theories emerge to explain natural and social phenomena, these are thought to replace explanations offer...

The knowledge of why people should eat fruit and how fruit should be grown and utilized has historically varied. Focusing on such questions, this paper examines the history of the “hometown of Chinese honey nectar peach,” Longquanyi district of the city of Chengdu. In the Republican era, new var...

This paper investigates the training and work of Regino García y Basa, a Filipino painter and botanist who shaped the science and visuality of Philippine flora in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Most well known as the lead illustrator of Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas (1877�...

This paper focuses on “hermaphrodites” -- that is, individuals who were considered neither simply male nor female -- and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. This era constituted a critical period for the profession of surgery and, as I argue, for long...

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...

This paper explores how Muslim medical healers in South Asia creatively positioned Islamic healing as a system of political critique and social renewal during the medical and political crises of World War II. Islamic humoral healing is a system of traditional medicine in South Asia that melds the an...

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...

Throughout history, there have been strong connections between science and education, with the history of science very often being a history of students, teachers, instructional sites, and educational activities. Education - both formal and informal - plays an important role in the formation of scie...

The existing literature coming from Science and Technology Studies (STS) on colonial India so far has paid insufficient attention to the agriculture sciences. Moreover, the existing studies on colonial India look as scientists not as practitioners of science, but rather as intellectuals and actors e...

This talkextends historical investigations in the field of the history and philosophy of science and religion it into the under-studied world of Islam and science in Colonial India. I will examine why it may be important to have a more global and comparative approach in the field...

This paper focuses on the construction of a transnational community of scientific critics of biological weapons research in the late 1950s and 1960s. First initiated in 1957, the Pugwash Conferences were a transnational venue for scientists to discuss and criticize the Cold War arms race, which emer...

The ideal strategy to secure the foundations of an empirically successful theory is to provide physical postulates on which it can then be unambiguously reconstructed. Identifying such postulates, especially when one wants them to be indisputable, may however prove difficult. Such is notoriously the...