Abstracts Archive

  Presented in 1869, the Periodic System is still an icon in contemporary science, even though the understanding of elements and chemical reactions has evolved tremendously over the last 150 years. The resilience of the Periodic System to conceptual changes is remarkable, and the fine structur...

Physical Sciences
Individual Paper

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Physical Sciences
Individual Paper

Knowledge is more than the sum of its facts. Historians have shown how intuitions, beliefs, rituals, fictions, and other ways of knowing bolster the cultural authority of scientific thinking in every era. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these alternatives to fact, knowledge claims still tend ...

Human and Social Sciences
Organized Session

This paper addresses questions about the current shape of the humanities raised through two experimental jewelry arts workshops held at a vocational school in the Canadian Arctic. These workshops investigated the idea of an artisanal epistemology in early modern enquiries into the natural world in r...

Practical Knowledge
Part of Organized Session

As it transited from tech to university in the late 1960s, Carnegie Mellon started the School of Urban and Public Affairs (SUPA) with the ambition to “deal in a scientific manner with problems of the public sector” and help build the “civil-industrial complex.” Funded by gifts from the Richa...

Environmental Sciences
Part of Organized Session

Prosthetic hands in early modern Europe were singular objects of artifice designed to supplement the natural body.  With moveable fingers and flesh-toned paint, they incorporated practical and aesthetic functions in ways impossible for other kinds of prostheses.  After all, silver noses could not ...

Practical Knowledge
Part of Organized Session

In early modern Europe, many princes saw enormous value in supporting natural knowledge at court, regularly supporting experts who could extend the power of the state over nature and sustain the health of the sovereign. In the mid-sixteenth century, however, a disturbing cluster of incidents at seve...

Natural Philosophy
Part of Organized Session

This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of th...

Practical Knowledge
Part of Organized Session

Situated at the intersection between the history of technology, economic history, and diplomatic history, this paper examines China’s three major waves of technology transfer during the Cold War period: from the Soviet in the 1950s, from Western European countries, the United States, and Japan in ...

Technology
Individual Paper

Standard histories of psychiatry rely heavily on the distinction between psychogenic and biogenic approaches to mental illness. This distinction provides a framework for grouping actors into larger configurations, tracing the tensions between those configurations, and explaining psychiatry’s major...

Medicine and Health
Individual Paper

 The concepts of biological specificity (of species, macromolecules, genes etc.) and genetic causality (in particular regarding heredity and development) played an important role in rendering biology a modern experimental science in the nineteenth century. Neglecting these concepts often led to sta...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

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...

Historiography
Roundtable

This talk will explore the relation of the notion of body to the Aristotelian categorial scheme as expressed in the distinction between body as substance (corpus substantia) and quantified body (corpus quantum) employed by thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers. The focus will be on the early th...

Historiography
Part of Organized Session

In 1960, veterinarians discovered an unknown toxic substance in poultry feed to have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of British turkeys. Veterinarians collaborated with nutrition scientists, chemists, toxicologists, and mycologists to identify what became known as aflatoxin, a carcinogenic...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

The modern interdisciplinary field of neuroscience is often thought to have begun as a result of the efforts of the biophysicist F. O. Schmitt, who spearheaded the growth of the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP) at MIT in the 1950s. This historical understanding is largely incorrect. At the same ...

Medicine and Health
Individual Paper

One might expect that our knowledge about a figure as well known and influential as Isaac Newton would be in a settled state after some three hundred years of historical research.  The present session reveals the reality to be quite the contrary.  The world of Newton scholarship is in a st...

Natural Philosophy
Organized Session

The production of alum crystal constituted a major manufacturing and international trading market in Europe from late medieval times onward. Its major use was as a mordant, a dye fixative, which had the further property of brightening the colours which it fixed. It had additional uses in leather tan...

Physical Sciences
Part of Organized Session

The papers in this session examine some of the attitudes and beliefs that various religious liberals held in conversation with science in England and America, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The first paper demonstrates that American Unitarians used “natural law theod...

Historiography
Organized Session

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century art history arises as a scientific discipline, taking part in the process of systematization of the human sciences in their relationship to the natural sciences. From the perspective of the history of science this period can be seen a...

Technology
Part of Organized Session

On a Sunday morning in 1805, Father Andrés Rosillo y Meruélo preached about a marvelous new discovery—a vaccine that promised to save his parishioners and their families from disease. The priest proclaimed in his sermon that day that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross not only enabled man’s ete...

Medicine and Health
Part of Organized Session

Beginning in the 1950s, two laboratories – one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union – engaged in the synthesis of elements with an atomic number greater than 100 (a third laboratory, in West Germany, began production in the 1980s).  Each relied on different methods for synthesis...

Physical Sciences
Part of Organized Session

  I argue that William Bateson’s analogies between the units of genetics and chemical elements are best understood as analogies to theoretical entities in the history and practice of chemistry. Bateson did not intend that the units of heredity answer to material units that behave in ways anal...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to train a strong military to ward off the Nationalists and Japanese in wartime Yanan, but faced tremendous challenges in protecting the health of its residents. Scholars have focused on the role of Norman Bethune in developing health care and scientific rese...

Non-Western Science
Part of Organized Session

In 2016 Deborah Gordon proposed that the term ‘division of labor’ was misleading and ought to be abandoned. The problem with the term, as she saw it, was that it implied a division of labor among specialized castes of workers to explain colony behavior. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, G...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

Historians of science have long been interested in the relationship between the making of scientific knowledge and emerging forms of nationalistic thinking. This panel gives a comparative examination of the intertwining of biology and nationalism in twentieth-century Korea and China. Consisting...

Life Sciences
Organized Session

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...

Historiography
Roundtable

Over the last several years, scholars have increasingly attended to the role of craft knowledge and artisanal practices in early modern Europe. These studies have investigated the importance of hands-on experience for ways of knowing about the world and pointed to the significance of artisanal pract...

Practical Knowledge
Organized Session

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology’s ability to improve the world, catalysed by promising new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory and Mendel’s newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and th...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

This panel examines how in the second half of the 20th century, the human sciences employed mathematical, engineering, and computer sciences to model, formalize, and control the human mind and behavior. The simulation of social and mental processes was relevant for computer programming, the scientif...

Human and Social Sciences
Organized Session

What makes one research program croak, and another purr? Touted as the origin point of second-order cybernetics, the 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” emerged from attempts by MIT’s Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettvin, and others to apply cybernetic logic to living brain...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or feedlots, are sites in which animal bodies are produced through the systematic application of scientific knowledge, state regulations, and the logic of capitalism. It is where cattle are “finished” on genetically-modified grains laced with hormones and ...

Environmental Sciences
Part of Organized Session

In recent years, historians of both science and the arts have recognized the vital role of craft knowledge and artisanal practice in the development of the premodern sciences. Nevertheless, unraveling the complex relationships between speculative/intellectual and practical/artisanal traditions in th...

Practical Knowledge
Organized Session

This panel aims to consider the contributions of Asian traditions of scholarship to the formation of modern disciplines commonly seen as Western in origin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, academic disciplines now grouped as the humanities and social sciences took shape in new univers...

Non-Western Science
Organized Session

  Insights of book historians into the production and circulation of printed items have alerted historians of science to the scientific book as a material, commercial, and epistemic object. In recent years the scope of interest has broadened to include scientific paper technologies, scribal pra...

Human and Social Sciences
Organized Session

  Noise has been a common sonic experience since the beginning of history.  For a long time, noise was construed as sound of any form, aggregate of sounds, voice, cry, or roar that was voluminous, disturbing, composite, or extraordinary.  By the nineteenth century, however, two speci...

Physical Sciences
Individual Paper

    Since the 1970’s epidemiological measures focusing on “health-related quality of life” have figured increasingly as endpoints in clinical trials. Before the 1970’s these measures were known, generically, as functional measures or health status measures. Relabeled as “quality ...

Medicine and Health
Individual Paper

In this talk I assess how the availability of Newton's writings in a searchable, digital format has transformed our capacity to understand and explain his intellectual work. I examine the ways in which the existence of various datasets has allowed modern researchers both to examine Newton's work in ...

Natural Philosophy
Part of Organized Session

This essay examines the maternity ward records in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in order to understand the hospital as a space where mothers, doctors, and midwives encountered one another and the State, and where they sought to legitimize and define the field of medicine at a time when childbirth ...

Medicine and Health
Part of Organized Session

This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, ident...

Human and Social Sciences
Organized Session

Southern California is the land of sunshine, outdoor adventures, and opportunities. It is the place of movies, aerospace industry, and a bastion of scientific research activities. These images are the result of active promotion by the region’s boosters for the past 150 years, as Southern Californi...

Physical Sciences
Individual Paper