***If you find errors in your session or abstract, please click here. Note that editing your proposal updates our database but does not affect this page. The final program, which will include all updates, will be put online closer to the meeting date.
Preliminary Program
Thursday, 1:00-5:00 p.m.
HSS Council Meeting
(* session organizer)
Thursday, 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Co-Plenary Roundtable: Climate Change Science, Environmental Challenges, and Cultural Anxiety (T1)
(Precirculated discussion papers (10-15 pages) will be posted by 6 October at http://www.colby.edu/sts/hss2008climate.)
*James R. Fleming, Colby College
Marilyn Gaull, Boston University, “Romantic Climates: ‘A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”
Vladimir Jankovic, University of Manchester, “Climatological Citizenship: The Many Lives of a Modern Fetish”
Matthias Dörries, Université Louis Pasteur, “‘Nuclear Winter’ and Global Climatic Change”
Spencer R. Weart, Center for the History of Physics, AIP, “‘Educational Toys:’ The Evolution and Persistence of Simple Models of Climate Change”
Roger D. Launius, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “Venus-Earth-Mars: Comparative Climatology and the Search for Life in the Solar System”
Co-Plenary Workshop: Informational Session About Job Creation in HTSM Through UTeach Natural Sciences (T2)
*Abigail Lustig, University of Texas at Austin
Mary Walker, University of Texas at Austin
Brett Bennett, University of Texas at Austin
Alberto Martinez, University of Texas at Austin
Bruce Hunt, University of Texas at Austin
Co-Plenary COE Workshop: Instruments, Internet, and Innovation in the History of Science Classroom (T3)
*Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia
Richard Kremer, Dartmouth College, “Reading Artifacts: On Teaching with Historic Instruments”
David Pantalony, Canada Science and Technology Museum, “Teaching with Artifacts: The Museum Context”
Peter Ramberg, Truman State University, “Internet-Based Teaching Tools for History of Science Classes”
Thursday, 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Welcome Orientation for First-time Attendees
Joint Opening Reception with PSA
Thursday, 8-10 p.m.
Chemical History Interest Dinner: The Carlton Restaurant, 500 Grant Street, Pittsburgh, PA, http://thecarltonrestaurant.com/ $40 per person; special $20 rate for student. For details and to register, go to http://www.chemheritage.org.
Friday, 7:30 - 8:45 a.m.
Women’s Caucus Business Meeting
Friday, 9:00 - 11:45 a.m.
Mathematical Languages (F1)
Joan Richards, Brown University, “The Logic of Women: Words and Reason in the World of Sophia De Morgan”
Jacqueline Wernimont, Brown University, “Modes of Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Mathematics”
Matthew Jones, Columbia University, "Formalism and its Discontents: The Danger of Frivolous Mathematics in the Mid-Enlightenment”
Chair: *Amir Alexander, UCLA, “Mathematical Poetics”
Scientific Nationalism and Modern East Asia (F2)
Zuoyue Wang, Harvey Mudd College, “A Model of Modernity? Chinese American Scientists in China since 1971”
Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota, “Scientific Nationalism in Japan”
John DiMoia, National University of Singapore, "Let's Have the Proper Number of
Children and Bring them Up Well!": Family Planning, Biomedicine, and Nation-
Building in South Korea, 1961-1968”
Honghong Tinn, Cornell University, “Science, Technical Aid, and Tinkering with Mainframe Computing in Cold War Taiwan, 1955-1965”
Chair: *John DiMoia, National University of Singapore
*Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota
Commentator: Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia
Audio/Visual: Techniques of Speech, Music, and Signal
*John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania, “Fantastic Instruments: Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and the Foucault Connection”
Robert Brain, University of British Columbia, “From Acoustic Image to Sacred Vibrations: Experimental Phonetics and the Invention of Free Verse Poetry in Fin de Siècle France”
Julia Kursell, Max Planck Institute, “Tracing Beauty: A Pianist’s Collection of Fingerprints in Experimental Psychology around 1900”
*Mara Mills, University of Pennsylvania, “Signal and Noise: The History of the Audiogram”
The Hard Part: Paleontology and the Evolutionary Synthesis (F3)
*Miranda Paton, Cornell University, “The Complexities of Consistency: Sewall Wright, George Gaylord Simpson and Modeling Evolution”
David Sepkoski, University of North Carolina-Wilmington, “The ‘Species Concept’ and the Growth of Paleobiology”
Warren D. Allmon, Paleontological Research Institute/Museum of the Earth, “Of Babies and Bathwater: Osborn, Gould, the Synthesis and Paleontology”
Patricia Princehouse, Case Western Reserve University, “German Paleontologists vs. Intelligent Designists”
William B. Provine, Cornell University, “Random Drift and the Evolutionary Synthesis”
Chair: William B. Provine, Cornell University
Isolation or Co-operation? Discipline Formation and Multidisciplinarity in Philosophy of Science in America 1918-1968 (F4)
Heather Douglas, University of Tennessee, “The Philosophy of Science Association as an Interdisciplinary Society”
Gary Hardcastle, Bloomsburg University, “A ‘Coalition Dominated by the Unorthodox’: The Beginning of the Philosophy of Science Association”
Joel Isaac, University of London, “The Ecumenical Moment: Philosophy of Science, Scientific Philosophy, and Philosophical Science in Interwar America”
*Alan Richardson, University of British Columbia, “Edgar A. Singer, Jr, and American Experimentalism: From Philosophy of Science to Social Science, 1930-1955”
Chair: Alan Richardson, University of British Columbia
The Role of Scientific Expertise in Activist Movements (F5)
*Lisa Rumiel, York University, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Scientist Activists: The Activism of Union of Concerned Scientists from 1980 to 1986”
Paul Rubinson, University of Texas, “An Elaborate Way of Committing National Suicide”: Carl Sagan, Popularization, and Nuclear Winter”
Megan Barnhart, University of Minnesota, “Turning ‘Ordinary Housewives’ into ‘Opinion Makers:’ The Scientists’ Movement, the NCAI, and the Nascent Public”
Amy Hay, University of Texas - Pan American, “‘The Quickening Conscience’: Scientists Protest Agent Orange”
Zach Falck, Independent Scholar, “Advocating Ecological Practices as Environmental Activism: Frank Egler and Rights-of-way Management in the 1950s and 1960s”
Chair: Kelly Moore, University of Cincinnati
Standardization in 20th-century Medicine (F6)
*Jonathan Simon, Université Lyon 1, “Standardization and the History of the Medical Sciences”
Christian Bonah, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, “From Arrow Poison to IV Drug: African Plant Seeds, C.F. Boehringer Co and the Question of Standard Drugs, 1900-1930”
Tricia Close-Koenig, Université Louis Pasteur Strasbourg, “Classifying Cancers, Standardizing Practice”
Volker Hess, Charité, Berlin,“Standardizing Values - the Value of Standardization. Implementation of Serotherapy as Model of Modern Drug Regulation in France and Germany, 1894-1900”
Chair: Nicolas Rasmussen, University of New South Wales
Social Science Ideas, Methods, Ethics and Identity in mid 20th-century America (F7)
Jill Morawski, Wesleyan University, “The Psychology Experiment as Coercion”
*Mark Solovey, University of Toronto, “Harry Alpert’s Adventure on the Endless Frontier: What is this Thing Called Social Science?”
Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University, “Database of Dreams: Toward A Postwar American Science of Subjectivity”
Michael Pettit, York University, “Behavioral Endocrinology, Bisexual Rats, and 'the Straight State’”
Chair: Laura Stark, Northwestern University
Commentator: Sarah Igo, University of Pennsylvania
Towards a History of Scientific Observation: Empiricism at Home and on the Move (F8)
Katharine Park, Harvard University, “Watching and Waiting: Observation in Medieval Theory and Practice”
Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, “Questionnaires and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”
Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California, “The Geography of Observation: Natural History, Place, and Visibility in the 18th-century Spanish Empire”
*Mary Terrall, UCLA, “Frogs on the Mantelpiece: Glimpses into the Observing Life”
Harro Maas, University of Amsterdam, “Armchair Observation in Nineteenth Century Political Economy”
Chair: Michael Gordin, Princeton University
The Culture of Cybernetics: Case-Studies from Soviet Russia & USA (F9)
*Margareta Tillberg, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, “Design of Control Rooms: Russia under Brezhnev”
Mirjam Goller, Humboldt University, Berlin, “Cybernetics as Model in Russian Philosophy from the Modernist Age to Nowadays Thinking”
Maxim Waldstein, Leiden University, “Toward the Humanistic Calculus: The Formalist Renaissance in Soviet Linguistics, 1950-1963”
Stefan Rieger, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, “Psychocybernetics in 20th-century USA”
Commentator: Philipp von Hilgers, Humboldt University, Berlin
Friday, 12:00 - 12:30 p.m.
Business Meeting for the Forum for the History of Science in America
Friday 12:00 - 1:15 p.m.
From Dissertation to Book: A Roundtable on First-Time Scholarly Book Publication (F10)
*Jacqueline Wernimont, Brown University
*Roger Turner, University of Pennsylvania
Karen Darling, The University of Chicago Press
Doreen Valentine, Rutgers University Press
Marguerite Avery, The MIT Press
Friday, 12:30 - 1:15 p.m.
Distinguished Scientist Lecture for the Forum for History of Science in America (F11)
Garland Allen, “‘Culling the Herd’: Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the U.S., 1890-1940”
Friday, 12:30 - 1:15 p.m.
Earth and Environment Forum Meeting
Friday, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m.
Roundtable/Workshop: Electronic Scholarship and the History of Science Technology and Medicine (F12)
*Sarah Lowengard, Independent Scholar; Brett Bobley, National Endowment for the Humanities; Ben Cohen, University of Virginia; Stephen Greenberg, NIH/NLM; Scott W. Palmer, University of Western Illinois; *Maria Rentetzi, National Technical University of Athens; Urs Schoepflin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; Joachim Schummer, editor HYLE; Audra Wolfe, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Friday, 1:30 – 3:10 p.m.
Early Modern Arts and Images (F13)
Meghan Doherty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Faithornes, ‘The Art of Graveing,’ a Language of Accuracy and the Royal Society”
Katherine Reinhart, The Johns Hopkins University, “Builders and Users: The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Construction of the Paris Observatoire”
Voula Saridakis, Lake Forest College, “Collaborators or Competitors? The Astronomical Correspondence of G-D Cassini and John Flamsteed”
Sally Metzler, “The Emperor and the Alchemist: Habsburg Patronage of Alchemy and its Impact on the Arts”
Chair: Jean-Francois Gauvin, Harvard University
Managerial Science in Post-War America (F14)
Judy Klein, Mary Baldwin College, “The Cold War Modeling Nexus of Economics, Operations Research, and Control Engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology”
Isaac Record, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, “The Role of Technological Advance in the History of Scientific Practice”
Benjamin Wang, Cornell University, “Literally Above Politics?: NASA, the Deep Space Network, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Apartheid South Africa”
Kevin Walsh, University of California, San Diego, “Bringing the Future Closer: The Emergence of the U.S. Academic Supercomputer Centers 1980-1990”
Women and Patriarchal Science (F15)
Vincent Guillin, College de France, “Five Ways of Being a Scientific Phallocrat: Auguste Comte’s Biological Arguments for the Subjection of Women”
Michal Meyer, University of Florida, “Circulating Physical Geography: The Different Roles of Science”
Brant Vogel, “Gentle-women at London: Gender and the Rise of the Weather Instrument”
Staffan Wennerholm, Uppsala University, “Invisible Work in the Scientific Family: The Case of Early Twentieth-century Swedish Geology”
Chair: Wendy Zirngibl, Montana State University
Science and Pedagogy (F16)
Nicholas Spicher, The Johns Hopkins University, “The Method of Mirania: The Teaching of Natural Philosophy in 18th-century Philadelphia”
James Elwick, York University, “A ‘certain compulsion upon the authorities’: 19th-century Competitive Written Examinations, Objectivity, and Educational Reform”
Philip Loring, Harvard University, “From Johnny to Chomsky”
Christopher Phillips, Harvard University, “Disciplining the Mind: Mathematics as the Cold War Subject”
Chair: Nancy Hall, University of Delaware
Nineteenth-century Science and Technological Aims (F17)
Graeme Gooday and Efstathios Arapostathis, University of Leeds, “Purity vs. Property? The Patenting Context of Constructing 'Pure' and 'Applied' Electricity 1880-1920”
Bruce Hevly, University of Washington, “Taking Aim at Physics: The Ballistic Pendulum, Physics Concepts and Rifle Marksmanship”
H. M. Jaim, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, “Indian War Rocket: A World Class Technology by Local Artisans”
Paul Lucier, “Mining Science and Mining Law on the Comstock Lode”
Chair: Sharrona Pearl, University of Pennsylvania
The Christian Confrontation with Science (F18)
Matt Gunterman, Yale University, “The Germ in the Chalice: A Case When Science Met the Sacred”
Samantha Muka, Florida State University, “Sacralized Health and Social Reform: Protestant and Catholic Reactions to Syphilis in America, 1900-1914”
Adam Shapiro, University of British Columbia, “Race and Creationism in Europe”
Janneke van der Heide, University of Amsterdam, “Darwinism as a Secular Religion: The Netherlands, 1859-1909”
Chair: John Lynch, Arizona State University
Instruments and Images in the 19th/20th Century (F19)
David Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Representation and Intervention: Visualizing the Pathogenesis of Myocardial Infarction, 1970-1990”
Meegan Kennedy, Florida State University, “Adulteration and the Microscope: The Limits of Revelation”
Omar Nasim, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science/MPI for History of Art, “Observation and the Hand: Observing Books and Nebular Research”
Kelley Wilder, De Montfort University, “Observation and the Photographic Method in the Laboratory of the Becquerels”
The Project of Genetics (F20)
Melinda Gormley, Oregon State University, “German Émigré Geneticists in America, 1930s & 1940s”
Aaron Mauck, Harvard University, “Pricing Thrifty Genes: Chronic Disease and the Thrifty Gene Controversy, 1962-1989”
Samuel Schindler, University of Leeds, “Photo #51, the CCV theory, and the Discovery of the DNA Structure”
Ulrich Krohs, University of Hamburg, “The Roots of Organismic Thinking in Systems Biology”
Chair: Robert Olby, University of Pittsburgh
Colonial Natural History in the Modern Era (F21)
Thomas Anderson, Binghamton University, “Globalizing the Strange: The Science of 19th Century Madagascar”
Deepanwita Dasgupta, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “William Jones and S. N. Bose: Scientific Consensus, Intellectual Authority and the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge-Making in Colonial India”
Elizabeth Green Musselman, Southwestern University, “Breaking Through: Meteors and Universal Knowledge in Colonial South Africa”
Lukas Rieppel, Harvard University, “The Ancient Land of Sheba: Value and Exploration in Early 20th-century America”
Chair: Deepanwita Dasgupta, University of Minnesota
Medieval Science (F22)
Temitope Charlton, Harvard University, “The Power of Places: Ethnogeography in Thirteenth Century Dominican and Franciscan Missions Accounts”
Abdul Nassser Kaadan, Aleppo University, “The Achievements of Albucasis in Neurosurgery”
Elly Truitt, Bryn Mawr College, “Necromancy, Celestial Divination, and the Introduction of Arabic Science into England, c. 1050-1125”
Michael Fournier, Dalhousie University, “Boethius and the Consolatio quadrivii”
Chair: Alain Touwaide, Smithsonian Institute
Friday, 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.
The Uglies of Nature: Observation and Aesthetics in the Oceans (F23)
*Katharine Anderson, York University, “The Scientist and the Reef: Coral and the Nature of Ocean Life”
Anne Secord, University of Cambridge, "'Nature’s Rejectamenta’: Seaweeds and the Scientific Observer”
Gary Kroll, SUNY Plattsburgh, “Cultivating a Sense of Wonder: William Beebe, Rachel Carson and 20th-century Oceanic Natural History”
Commentator: Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan, Dearborn
Intellectual Histories of 20th-century Biology: Discipline Building, Politics, and Philosophy (F24)
*Jason Byron, University of Pittsburgh, “Holism in Early Sexology: Biological and Philosophical Contexts”
*Thomas Cunningham, University of Pittsburgh, “John Burdon Sanderson Haldane’s Intellectual Heritage”
Matthew Dunn, Indiana University, “Dobzhansky’s Evolutionary Genetics: Natural Populations or Mirroring Morgan?”
Commentator: Betty Smocovitis, University of Florida
The Eye Through Time (F25)
*Orit Halpern, New School for Social Research, “Architectures of Communication: Cybernetics, Temporality, and Perception in Post-war American Design”
Jimena Canales, Harvard University, “An Eye for an Eye: On Cinematographic Morality”
Despina Kakoudaki, American University, “Deep Frame: Picturing the Body in Early Cinema”
Josh Ellenbogen, University of Pittsburgh, “Impressed Images”
Chair: Orit Halpern, New School for Social Research
To Market: A New Look at the Medical Marketplace (F26)
Kara Swanson, Harvard University, “The Professional Donor: Gifts, Gain and the Medical Marketplace in the United States”
Deborah Levine, Washington University, “Marketing Measurement: Anthropometric Technologies in the American Marketplace”
*Suzanne Fischer, University of Minnesota, “Apologia for Quackery: Medical Entrepreneurship and the Problem of Efficacy”
Chair and Commentator: Elizabeth Toon, University of Manchester
Scientific Objects in Motion (F27)
Avner Ben-Zaken, Harvard Society of Fellows, “Object in Motion: Networks, Trust and Science in the Eastern Mediterranean”
*Daniel Margocsy, Harvard University, “Encyclopedias and the Long-distance Exchange of Specimens”
Koen Vermeir, University of Leuven, “Circulating the Golden Flower”
Commentator: Adelheid Voskuhl, Harvard University
*Chair: Avner Ben-Zaken, Harvard Society of Fellows
Compelling Cosmogonies: World-building in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (F28)
*Dane Daniel, Ohio State University, “Complementary Cosmogonies: Paracelsus on the Creations by God the Father and God the Son”
*Allison Kavey, CUNY John Jay College, “‘The Mistriss of Her Own Operation:’ The Relationship between the Divine and the Natural and the Potential for Practitioners in Agrippa’s Cosmogony”
Sheila Rabin, St Peter’s College, “The Astrological Cosmos of Johannes Kepler”
Chair: Allison Kavey, CUNY John Jay College
Commentator: Lawrence Principe, The Johns Hopkins University
Divergent Struggles in the Evolution of Relativity (F29)
*Alberto Martínez, University of Texas at Austin, “From Ampère’s Kinematics to Einstein’s Relativity”
Scott Walter, Université Nancy 2, France, “Cambridge Dynamics and German Relativity, 1909-1915”
Daniel Kennefick, University of Arkansas, “Not Only Because of Theory: Eddington and his Theory-Testing Bias in the 1919 Eclipse Expedition”
María Jesús Santesmases, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, “Heredity in the Clinic: Early Cytogenetics from London to Madrid, 1956-1966”
Chair and Commentator: Richard Staley, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Animal Biographies (F30)
Janet Browne, Harvard University, “Seeing the Gorilla”
Fabio de Sio, Naples Zoological Station, “Anton Dohrn, Western Science and the Octopus. The Unkept Promises of a Laboratory Animal”
*Tania Munz, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “Bees of the Hive”
Chair & Commentator: Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Imperial Legacies of Early Modern Science (F31)
Steven James Harris, Harvard University, “Trading Zone or Battleground? Power, Knowledge, and Nature in 17th-century New France”
Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Colgate University, “Local Experts, Imperial Agents, and Experience as Common Ground: The Sixteenth-century Science of the Atlantic World”
*Matthew Underwood, Harvard University, “Government by Questionnaire: Epistemic Technique as Political Technology in the Early Modern English Atlantic World”
Chair & Commentator: Larry Stewart, University of Saskatchewan
Spaces and Places in the History of American Social Science (F32)
Christopher Green, York University, “The Mind in the Urban Jungle: Chicago’s Psychology in the 1890s”
Janet Martin-Nielsen, University of Toronto, “Private Words, Private Actions: The ‘MIT Space’ and Chomskyan Linguistics, 1957-1968”
*Alexandra Rutherford, York University, “Putting Behavior in its Place: The Sites and Spaces of Behavior Modification, 1950s-1970s”
Chair & Commentator: James Capshew, Indiana University
Friday, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
HSS and PSA Reception
Friday, 9:30 - 11:00 p.m.
Graduate Student Party
Saturday, 9:00 - 11:45 a.m.
How Well Do “Facts” Travel? (S1)
Naomi Oreskes, University of California, San Diego, “You Can Argue with the Facts: A Political History of Climate Change”
Simona Valeriani, London School of Economics, “Scientific Facts and Building Artefacts”
Alison Wylie, University of Washington, “Archaeological Facts in Transit”
Rachel Ankeny, University of Adelaide, “Cases as ‘Fact Carriers’ in Contemporary Medicine”
*Chair and Commentator: Mary Morgan, LSE & U. of Amsterdam
Physics, History, and Beyond: Seeing the World through Spencer Weart’s Eyes (S2)
Mary Jo Nye, Oregon State University, “Scientists in Power: Pioneering the Modern History of Physics”
Ellen Bales, University of California, Berkeley, “Nuclear Images, Nuclear Imaginaries, Nuclear Fears: Cultural History Beyond ‘The Public’”
Alexei Kojevnikov, University of British Columbia, “More is Different, or ‘the transition from quantity to quality’”
Deborah Coen, Barnard College, Columbia University, “The ‘Social Discovery’ of Global Warming”
*Chair: David Kaiser, M.I.T.
*Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara
Commentator: Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics
Human Sciences and Empire (S3)
Cornelia Lambert, University of Oklahoma, “Empiricism and Empire: Robert Owen’s Scotland in the Romantic Age”
Kathleen Sheppard, University of Oklahoma, “Serving the Empire: Nineteenth-century Women Archaeologists in the Field”
Theresa Ventura, Columbia University, “From Tropical Agriculture to Ethnobotany: Trajectories of American Agricultural Science in the Philippines, 1898-1946”
*Christine Manganaro, University of Minnesota, “Race Crossing in Hawai'i: Harry L. Shapiro and the Chinese-Hawaiian Project, 1926-1936”
Chair and Commentator: John Jackson, University of Colorado-Boulder
Science and Religion in Early Modern Europe (S4)
*Peter Harrison, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, “God and Early Modern Natural Philosophy”
Mark Waddell, Michigan State University, “Kircher’s Singing Cats, or, Syncretism as Catholicism”
John Henry, University of Edinburgh, “Isaac Newton: Biblicist or Deist?”
*Margaret J. Osler, University of Calgary, “What Does Religion Have to Do with the Scientific Revolution”
Chair: Margaret J. Osler, University of Calgary
Negotiating the Human: Paleoanthropology Images, Objects, and Audiences (S5)
Richard Delisle, University of Chicago, “Humanity’s Uncertain Boundaries Until the 1930s: A Late Consensus on Slow Zoological and Paleontological Surveys”
Matthew Goodrum, Virginia Tech, “Defending Australopithecus as a Human Ancestor: Raymond Dart, the Osteodontokeratic, and Tool-use as a Criterion for Establishing the Phylogenetic Status of Hominids”
*Jesse Richmond, University of California, San Diego, “Le Gros Clark vs. Zuckerman: Reckoning Ancestry and Expertise in Post-war Paleoanthropology”
Marianne Sommer, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, “A Knight’s Quest for Bringing Lost Worlds Home: Charles Knight and the American Imagination”
Science, Politics, and Culture: New Perspective on Science and Medicine in Modern East Asia and Beyond (S6)
Fa-ti Fan, The State University of New York at Binghamton, “An American Entomology in China: J. G. Needham and His Chinese Colleagues”
*Danian Hu, The City College of New York, “One Doctrine, Two Different Consequences: the Contentions of Relativity in China and the Soviet Union”
Soyoung Suh, University of California at Los Angeles, “When Did Chinese Medicine Become Korean?: ‘Local Botanicals’ in the Korean Tradition of Medicine”
Chia-Hua Lee, University of Tokyo, “Beyond the Changing of Symbols: The Transmission of the Calculus to China and Japan in the Nineteenth Century”
Grace Shen, York University, “A Glacial Reception: Li Siguang, Quaternary Geology and Politics of Scientific Persuasion”
Chair: Joseph Dauben, City University of New York
*Commentator: Yibao Xu, Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York
Studies in the Internalization of Mathematics: Goals, Strategies, and the Outcomes in 19th and 20th Centuries (S7)
Sponsored by the International Commission for the History of Mathematics
*Karen Parshall, University of Virginia, “The Internationalization of Mathematics in a World of Nations: 1800-1960”
Joe Dauben, City University of New York, “Western Mathematics in the Middle Kingdom: Elite versus Grass Roots Strategies”
David Zitarelli, Temple University, “Mathematics at World’s Fairs: Chicago 1893 and St. Louis 1904”
*Patti Hunter, Westmont College, “Gertrude Cox in Africa: A Case Study in Science Patronage and International Statistics Education in the Cold War”
Chair: Deborah Kent, Hillsdale College
Communicating Knowledge: Changing Ideas of Risk, Uncertainty, and the Public in 20th-century American Science (S8)
*Michael Egan, McMaster University, “Vernacular Knowledge and Expertise: The Scientists’ Institute for Public Information and the Science of the Environmental Crisis”
Kelly Moore, University of Cincinnati, “Fighting Fat: The USDA, the Cold War, and Standards of Bodily ‘Fitness’”
Jody Roberts, Chemical Heritage Foundation, “Making Sense of Human Biomonitoring Studies: The Evolving Politics of Communicating Exposure Results by Governments, Industries, and NGOs”
Sarah Vogel, Columbia University, “'Known Knowns,' 'Known Unknowns,' and 'Unknown Unknowns': Communicating the Risks of Bisphenol A in the Plastics Age, Late 1970s to the present”
Chair: Jody Roberts, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Crisis? What Crisis? Causes and Contexts of the Crisis in Psychology in Early 20th-century Europe (S9)
*Uljana Feest, Technische Universität, Berlin, “Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Philosophy”
Annette Mülberger, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, “Kostyleff’s Book on the Crisis of Psychology and its Reception in Spain”
John Carson, University of Michigan, “Cries of ‘Crisis’ in Turn-of-the-Century French Psychology
Ludmila Hyman, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “Between History and Methodology: Vygotsky’s Crisis in Context”
Commentator: Francesca Bordogna, Northwestern University
Genetics & Biomedicine (S10)
Nathanial Comfort, The Johns Hopkins University, “Why is Victor McKusick Considered the ‘Father of Medical Genetics’?”
*Angela Creager, Princeton University, “Artificial Radioisotopes and Cancer: Experimental Therapies, Diagnostic Methods, and Risk in the Atomic Age”
Soraya de Chadarevian, UCLA, “Genetics and Public Health in the 1960s”
Maria Jesus Santesmases, Departamento de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, Instituto de Filosofía, CSIC, Madrid, “Heredity in the Clinic: Early Cytogenetics from London to Madrid, 1956-1966”
Chair: Angela Creager, Princeton University
Commentator: Susan Lindee, University of Pennsylvania
Saturday, 12:00 - 12:30 p.m.
Forum for the History of Human Sciences Business Meeting
Saturday, 12:30 - 1:15 p.m.
Forum for the History of Human Science Distinguished Lecture (S11)
Henrika Kuklick
Saturday, 1:30 – 3:10 p.m.
Managing Risk: Assuaging Doubt (S12)
Grischa Metlay, Harvard University, “Risky Drinking: Conceptions of Risk in Debates about Prohibition, 1900-1920”
Ioanna Semendeferi, University of Houston, “Regulating ALARA – as Low as Reasonably Achievable? Health-Physics Practice and Profession”
Don Leggett, University of Kent, “‘Our ‘doubts’ in fact appear to me as sacred’: William Froude, Test Tanks and Victorian Doubt”
Chair: Fritz Davis, Florida State University
Dimensions of a Scientific Career (S13)
Paul Halpern, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, “The Tragic Final Years of Paul Ehrenfest”
Kristina Espmark, Umeå University, Sweden, “When Science is Paradise: Research and Boundaries in Astrid Cleve von Euler’s Scientific Career”
Brigitte Van Tiggelen, Universite catholique de Louvain; Annette Lykknes, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, “Women of Science and Wife of a Scientist: Ida Noddack-Tacke,”
Edward Jurkowitz, Illinois Institute of Technology, “Planck’s Unification of Physics with/in German Liberal Culture”
Mechanism and Life in the 18th Century (S14)
Geerdt Magiels, VUB Free University Brussels, “Why Did Nobody Ever Discover Photosynthesis?”
Minwoo Seo, Seoul National University, “Mediating Models and Machines: John Smeaton and the Interactions between Natural Philosophy and Engineering in 18th-century Britain”
Tobias Cheung, Humboldt-University Berlin, “Playing Music on a Weaving Machine: The Relation between Nature, Science, and Technique in Charles Bonnet’s Statue of Organized Bodies”
Lynnette Regouby, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Man as Machine, Man as Plant: Analogies of the Body in La Mettrie’s L’homme plante”
Chair: Sara Miles, Esperanza College, Eastern University
Collectors and Museums (S15)
Taika Dahlbom, University of Turku, Finland, “Specimen, née Example: Zoological Objects of Inquiry since 1655”
Amy Margaris and Linda T. Grimm, Oberlin College, “Arctic Exploration & Ethnological Collecting in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”
Conor Burns, York University, “Between Science and History: Archaeological Conceptions of the Past in 19th- century America”
Sarah Mitchell, University of Southampton, “Science or Spectacle: The Tale of a False Dichotomy”
Chair: Bruno Strasser
Paradigms of Medical Science (S16)
Mazi Allen, Saint Mary’s College of California, “Attitude musulman maghrébine devant la folie and Le phénomène de l’agitation en milieu psychiatrique: An Extended Critique of Psychiatry in the West.”
Pratik Chakrabarti, University of Kent at Canterbury, “Living versus Dead: The Making of the Semple Anti-rabic Vaccine’”
Sanem Guvenc-Salgirli, State University of New York at Binghamton, “From Public Health to Eugenics: The 1937 Typhus Epidemic in Istanbul”
Eun Jeong Ma, Cornell University, “What is ‘Colonial’ about Colonial Medicine and Science?”
Chair: Warwick Anderson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Harvey and the 17th-century Science of Life (S17)
Peter Distelzweig, University of Pittsburgh, “De Artificio Mechanico Musculorum: The Mechanical Problems in William Harvey’s De motu locali animalium”
Benjamin Goldberg, University of Pittsburgh, “De Generatione Animalium and the New Science”
Randy Kidd, St. John’s College, “Language of the Heart: The Mingling of Metaphoric and Literal References to the Heart and Blood in the Writings of Harvey and his Contemporaries”
Joel Klein, Indiana University, “Thomas Willis’s Experimental Chemical Anatomy”
Science and the American Public (S18)
David Hecht, Bowdoin College, “Scientific Americans: Nuclear Physics and Nationalism after Hiroshima”
James Hurlbut, Harvard University, “Confusing Deliberation: What ‘cloning’ Means for Democracy”
Daniel Thurs, University of Portland, “Martian Madness: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and the Construction of Mass Panic as a Response to Advances in Science and Technology”
Matt Tribbe, University of Texas at Austin, “‘A Far-Out Device’: Confronting the Thrilling, People-Killing Neutron Bomb in Carter-Era America”
Chair: Giny Cheong, George Mason University
In Darwin’s Day (S19)
Ingo Brigandt, University of Alberta, “Continuity in Scientific Concept Use: Homology in the 19th Century before and after Darwin”
Sondra Cooney, Kent State University, “Did the Land Rise or the Seas Recede? Robert Chambers’s Ancient Sea-Margins: Its Contribution to 19th Century Scientific Controversy”
Donald Forsdyke, Queen’s University, Canada, “William Bateson’s Unacknowledged Debt to Charles Darwin’s Research Associate George Romanes”
Chair: Rebecca Kinraide, Boston University
Philosophical Perspectives on Experiments and Model (S20)
Hasok Chang, University College, London, “Electrolysis before the Modern Ionic Theory: Underdetermination, Closure and Pluralism”
Paolo Palmieri, University of Pittsburgh, “Comparative Study of Experimentation in the Physical Sciences”
Karen Zwier, University of Pittsburgh, “John Dalton: From Puzzles to Chemistry by Way of Meteorology”
Hylarie Kochiras, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Gravity & Newton’s Substance Counting Problem”
Chair: Jacob Stegenga, University of California, San Diego
Ancient Science (S21)
Elizabeth Burns, University of Toronto, “Perspective in Ptolemy’s Almagest and Planetary Hypotheses”
Eli Diamond, Dalhousie University, “Aristotle's Account of Vision as Instrumental to his Account of Thinking in De Anima”
Marco Viniegra, Harvard University, “The Moral Dimension of Galen’s Ideal Doctor”
Posters
Grant Barkley, Kent State University, “Joseph C. Arthur [1850-1942]: First Proof of Bacteria as the Cause of Plant Disease”
Jonathon Erlen, University of Pittsburgh, “History of Science and Technology Materials in the European Union Library and Archives”
Harry Mark, “The Common View of Michelson's Experiment”
Roger Turner, University of Pennsylvania, “Comics in the TV Weather Report”
Kathryn Vignone, Cornell University, “Nanoimage Work at the Exploratorium’s Viz Lab”
Saturday, 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.
The Order of Language: Forms of Print and Early Modern Natural Knowledge (S22)
Carla Nappi, Montana State University, “The Order of Things: Translating Chinese and Arabic Nature in Early Modernity”
Kevin Chang, Academia Sinica, “Languages, Circulation and Authorship: Publication and Translation of Albrecht von Haller’s Dissertation on Irritability”
*Matthew Eddy, Durham University, “The Grammar of Anthropology”
Chair: Adrian Johns, University of Chicago
Desiderata, Erata, Queries: List-making and the Organization of Natural Knowledge, Material Goods, and the Community in Early Modern Science (S23)
Vera Keller, Princeton University, “The Desiderata List: Collecting the Future in the Early Modern Past”
Valentina Pugliano, Oxford University, “Letters and Lists for Practical Botanisers”
*Elizabeth Yale, Harvard University, “Apothecaries Think Natural Knowledge in Sixteenth-century Venice”
Chair and Commenter: Pamela Smith, Columbia University
Beauty and the Beast: Gender and Evolution at the Animal-Human Boundary (S24)
*Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University (Ohio), "Bearded Ladies, Hypertrichosis, and Evolutionary Anxieties about Gender, 1878-1900"
*Erika Lorraine Milam, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “The Problem with Beauty: Aesthetics, Rationality, and Female ‘Choice’”
Nadine Weidman, Harvard University, “Gender and Aggression in 1960s Popular Ethology”
Chair and Commentator: Abigail Lustig, The University of Texas at Austin
To Explain and Protect: A Century of Scientific Research on Children (S25)
Sponsored by the Forum for the History of Human Science
Kathleen Jones, “Unnatural and Monstrous: Creating ‘Child Suicide’ in the Nineteenth Century”
*Ellen Herman, University of Oregon, “‘At Risk’: Why Childhood Matters for History of Science”
*Marga Vicedo, “The Secret Life of Children: Searching for Children’s Natural Emotional Needs from London to Baltimore, via Uganda”
Chair and Commentator: Hamilton Cravens, Iowa State
Thinking with Machines (S26)
Alan Gabbey, Barnard College, Columbia University, “Hamlet and Other Machines”
Sophie Roux, Université Grenoble II, “Why Machines?”
*Maarten Van Dyck, Ghent University, “Mechanical Foundations for Collision”
Chair: Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University
Commentator: Peter Machamer, University of Pittsburgh
Nuclear Bombs, Radiation, and Risk: The United States Nuclear Weapons Program, 1945-1966 (S27)
*E. Jerry Jessee, Montana State University, Bozeman, “Toward the Ecological Body: Nuclear Fallout, Bodies and Environment at the Nevada Test Site”
David A. Burke, Auburn University, “Southern Devices: Atomic Testing In Mississippi, 1964-1966”
Laura J. Harkewicz, University of California, San Diego, “‘Selective Illumination:’ Using the Scientific Uncertainty of the Bravo Medical Program to Establish ‘Changed Circumstances’”
Chair and Commentator: Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Clemson University
New Studies of Religion and Science in America and Great Britain (S28)
Lily Santoro, University of Delaware, “Creation and the Natural World: The Popularization of Science During the Second Great Awakening, 1776-1840”
R. Clinton Ohlers, Independent Scholar, “The Place of Victorian Scientific Naturalism in the History of Science and Religion: Great Britain and America, 1830-1934”
Richard England, Salisbury University, “Beyond Christian Darwinism: The Rev. John Gulick on Science, Religion and the Limits of Language”
Alexander Pavuk, University of Delaware, “American Catholic Encounters with Evolution: The Early Twentieth Century”
*Chair: Edward B. Davis, Messiah College
Science and Spectacle in 18th-century Europe (S29)
*Mi Gyung Kim, North Carolina State University, “The Balloon Spectator”
*Michael Lynn, Agnes Scott College, “Controlling Spectacle and the Policing of Aeronautics in Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century”
Simon Werrett, University of Washington, “Science Goes Pyrotechnic: Fireworks as a Resource for Electrical Performance in the Eighteenth Century”
Chair: Tom Broman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Commentator: Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire
The Spread of the History of Science: Appropriations, Nationalisms, and Globalizations since Basalla (S30)
*Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of California, Berkeley, “Scientific Citizens: Experiments in Flag Nationalism and Laboratory Science in Ghana, 1956-1977”
Kenji Ito, Sokendai, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, “Pedagogical Structure and Failure of Knowledge Transmission: Marginalization of the History of Science in Japan”
Gabriela Soto Laveaga, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Populist Science: Politics and National Projects in Mexico, 1970-1976”
Chair: Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of California, Berkeley
Commentator: Buhm Soon Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Nervous Nellies: Neuroscience in the 20th Century (S31)
Otniel Dror, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Cultures of Adrenaline”
Katja Guenther, Harvard University, “The Nervous Body – Early 20th-century Neuroscience and the Rise of Cerebrocentrism”
Cai Guise-Richardson, Iowa State University, “Neurotic Dogs, Drunken Cats: Jules Masserman, Horsley Gantt, and the Development of Animal Models of Neurosis, 1930-60”
Vivien Hamilton, University of Toronto, “Physics in Use: Models of Electricity in 19th-century Electrotherapy Textbooks”
Chair: Howard Chiang
Saturday, 6:00 - 6:30 p.m.
Cash Bar Reception
Saturday, 6:30 - 7:30 p.m.
History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture
Steven Shapin, Harvard University
Saturday 7:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Announcement of 2008 Awards and Prize Winners
Saturday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Society Dinner
Sunday, 8:00 - 9:00 a.m.
History of Science Society Business Meeting
Sunday 9:00 – 11:45 a.m.
Animals, Biologists and Their Common Habitat (Su1)
*Christian Reiss, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “A Curiosity Becomes Standard: On the Mexican Axolotl’s Journey from ‘Nature’ to Scientific and Popular ‘Culture’, Ca. 1860 – 1900”
Raf De Bont, University of Leuven, “‘So Full of Romance, so Unspoiled, Rough, Rugged and Primitive’: The Bird Observatory in Rossitten and the Culture of the Outpost”
Georgina Montgomery, Montana State University, “Performing Science on ‘Performance’ Animals: Robert Mearns Yerkes and the Study of Primate Behavior”
Martina Schlünder, University of Giessen, “Between Alps, Operating Room, Stable and Laboratory: A Topography of Sheep in Modern Trauma Surgery (1960-)”
*Chair: Raf De Bont, University of Leuven
Heredity After Darwin: The Search for a Synthesis (Su2)
Gregory Radick, University of Leeds, “What Weldon Wanted: New Light on His Biometric Program”
*Marsha Richmond, Wayne State University, “Bateson’s Pre-Mendelian Study of Variation and Heredity”
Nils Roll-Hansen, University of Oslo, “Johannsen’s Genotype Theory and his Critique of Darwinism”
Judy Johns Schloegel, Independent Scholar, “The Pragmatist’s Path: Herbert Spencer Jennings and the Study of Heredity, Variation, and Evolution”
*Sander Gliboff, Indiana University, “Morphology Strikes Back: Richard Semon and a Counter-Revolt Against Genetics and Experimentalism”
New Directions in the Study of the Life and Work of Werner Heisenberg (Su3)
*Suman Seth, Cornell University, “Heisenberg’s Observables and Sommerfeld’s ‘Lawful Regularities’: Re-thinking the Methodological Origins of Matrix Mechanics”
David Cassidy, Hofstra University, “Revisiting Heisenberg, Uncertainty, and Quantum History”
Kristian Camilleri, University of Melbourne, “Heisenberg and Quantum Mechanics in Cultural Context: The Search For a New Weltanschauung”
Cathryn Carson, UC Berkeley, “Was Heisenberg Really Unphilosophical? Reflections from Practice and Theory”
Chair: Cathryn Carson, UC Berkeley
Vertical Geographies of Science (Su4)
*Michael Reidy, Montana State University, “From the Quarries to the Peaks: John Tyndall’s Vertical Physics”
Jeremy Vetter, Dickinson College, “Rocky Mountain High Science: Teaching, Research, and Nature at Field Stations”
Catherine Nisbett, University of Chicago, “Managing Vertical Distance: The Harvard College Observatory’s Boyden Expeditions”
Brianna Rego, Stanford University, “Tracing Arsenic through Mines, Mountains, and Groundwater: A History of Contamination and Science”
Chair: Michael Robinson, University of Hartford
Early Modern Science and Medicine (Su5)
Victoria Meyer, University of Virginia, “Giving the Pox: A Case of Medicine and Polemic in Enlightenment France”
Eric Palmer, Allegheny College, “The Best of all Panglosses”
James Evans, University of Puget Sound, “Students as Weapons: The Lyon Theses on Le Sage’s Theory of Gravitation (1770)”
Julie Grissom, University of Oklahoma, “Homo vermiculosus: Nicolas Andry and 18th-century Parasitology”
David Teira, Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (Madrid), “The Theology of Large Numbers: A Conjecture”
Chair: Peter Barker, Oklahoma University
Control and Scientific Boundaries (Su6)
Cynthia Bennet, Iowa State University, “Bridging the Gap: Science Service, Scientists, and the Press”
Krister Knapp, Washington University in St. Louis, “A Fact-in-Waiting: William James and Experimental Telepathy”
Robert Schombs, Cornell University, “Burning Questions: Justus Liebig on Spontaneous Human Combustion”
Christina Matta, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Finding a Stable Species: Physiology and Specificity in Ferdinand Cohn’s Bacterial Taxonomy”
David Schmit, College of St. Catherine , “Mesmeric Science in the mid-19th Century”
Organizing/Publicizing Science (Su7)
Melinda Baldwin, Princeton University, “Nature’s Contributors and the Changing of the Scientific Guard, 1869-1900”
Alex Csiszar, Harvard University, “Centralizing the Scientific Machine: Bibliographical Controversies at the End of the Nineteenth Century”
Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Sokendai, “Anglo-Japanese Chemistry Contacts in Action: The English Model of Chemical Education in Meiji Japan”
Marlous Blankesteijn, University of Amsterdam, “Changing Bodies of Knowledge: Professionalization and Legitimacy in Dutch Water Management 1970-2000”
Ari Barell, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, “Leviathan and the Academy: Symbiosis or Nationalization? State and University in the Early Years of Israel”