Member News

Bert Hansen published  “Research on Trichina (1885): An Unusual French Painting by Stanislas Torrents," Bulletin de l'Académie vétérinaire de France, 2025.  Accessible free at https://academie-veterinaire.fr/publications/bulletins-de-lavf/bavf-2025.html

Carola Sachse published Science and Diplomacy: The Max Planck Society in International Politics (1945-2000), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2025, 559 pp.

This book is available open access:

https://www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com/themen-entdecken/geschichte/zeitgeschichte-ab-1949/59196/science-and-diplomacy?number=VUR0010512

Pnina Abir-Am has been elected as an AAAS Fellow. She completed her service as Section L's Member-at-Large in March 2026. She continues to work with students on her research projects as part of Brandeis University-WSRC's Scholar-Student Partnership.

Interview with Arnold Thackray

By Jeffrey L. Sturchio

This interview is published in two parts. The second part will appear in the July edition of the HSS Newsletter.

Arnold Thackray’s career in the history of science began with his fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1965. After a year at Harvard, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, where he became the founding chairman of the Department of History &Sociology of Science, the editor of Isis, reviver of George Sarton's Osiris and developer of the HSS Newsletter, then the founding president and CEO of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute), founder and president of the Life Sciences Foundation, and co-founder and principal of Science History Consultants.

Thackray is the author or editor of over ten books and numerous published articles and essays. Thackray's memoir, Making Science History: A Personal Perspective from Alamogordo to Al, is being published by the American Philosophical Society Press this spring. For an anthology of Professor Thackray’s work published in honor of his 80th birthday, see Science: Has Its Present Past a Future? Selected Essays by Arnold Thackray, edited by J. L. Sturchio and B.V. Lewenstein  (Ithaca, NY: Seavoss Associates Publishing, 2022).

Jeffrey Sturchio:

HSS Newsletter readers will be interested to learn about the origins and early development of the Department of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Let's start there, with what you found when you arrived in Philadelphia and what you saw as the possibilities.

Arnold Thackray:

It was William Wordsworth who said of the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." And so it was of the history of science in the late 1960s. Opportunity was everywhere, thanks to the Baby Boom arriving in American colleges and Harvard president James Bryant Conant's campaign to make the history of science into a living undergraduate experience. I was quite unfamiliar with American life, having entered the field through the British context of a very ambivalent reception of this particular specialist field.                                                                                                          

In the fall of 1967, I began nine months at Harvard seeing the game as played professionally. I. Bernard Cohen had become a very confused Harvard undergraduate in 1933, staying on as assistant to Sarton on graduation in 1937. He finally obtained his PhD in 1947, the same year he became managing editor of Isis, later becoming its editor-in-chief. By the time I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from the other Cambridge, it was already 30 years beyond the moment when Cohen had begun his Harvard apprenticeship. Thomas S. Kuhn and a host of other post-docs, first at Harvard, then elsewhere, had articulated a real discipline where teaching undergraduates was the fundamental fuel of disciplinary growth.

After World War II, major universities were all setting up departments and programs. By 1967, Derek Price at Yale would publish a guide that listed no less than 29 graduate programs in the history of science and medicine. Penn was a clear anomaly. Although Philadelphia was, after all, the home of the United States as a political body and Penn was the home of chemistry in North America, with its first professorship, and while the city and the university could both boast all sorts of firsts, in relation to the history of science, they were simply confused laggards.

I was hired by Penn because of a windfall grant engineered by the American Philosophical Society, itself the oldest learned society in North America, to embrace activity in the history of science and medicine and to become a significant force in this field through an alliance with Penn and Bryn Mawr (a major, long-established women's college in a nearby suburb, newly contemplating graduate education). Together, the three would forge a different, new, exciting future. That was the theory. In practice, there was total disarray.

The University of Pennsylvania, when compared with the host of other institutions that come to mind, from Harvard to Berkeley, did not install a full-time president until well into the 20th century. What this meant, for an institution founded in the 18th century, is that it had a well-established and apparently endless series of independent fiefdoms, united, as they say, by a touching loyalty to a common central heating plant! Such was life at Penn.                 

The history of science prior to World War II had everywhere been run by elderly scientists grown bored with academic research, who turned instead to antiquarian pursuits. Penn offered a prime example.  Edgar Fahs Smith, a distinguished chemistry department chair, then university provost from 1911 to 1920, had in his later years created the world's leading collection in the history of chemistry. In the best Philadelphia style, the Smith Collection was still present and correct in 1967, but it had just gone bankrupt.  Chymia, published from the collection and the world's only academic journal in the field, had also just ceased publication. Nobody thought to tell this incoming bright-eyed and bushy-tailed assistant professor that the realities he thought he was coming to had just vanished.

The realities were stark, but the national and international demand in the English-speaking world for academic historians of science was at its height, as evidenced by the way that while still a Churchill College resident, I received a transatlantic telephone call inviting me to join the faculty at Johns Hopkins.  I would also receive an invitation from the leading historian of science in Australia to come and set up shop at the Australian National University, while the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (which had one of the only other significant chemistry collections), had offered me a tenured lectureship.

The Penn offer seemed the most attractive: a guaranteed five-year stint as an assistant professor, the keys to the Smith Collection, with Philadelphia itself, allegedly full of resources and talent, as the context. In operating practice, the discipline was flourishing everywhere in the United States, except at Penn! The one real promise was that Penn had hired Tom Kuhn's first and most favored student, John Heilbron, three years earlier. Yet even as I arrived, Heilbron left to go back to Berkeley and join Kuhn's own expanding enterprise.

Mine was a strange initiation: one way round, everything was there, yet another way round, nothing was there.  Physically, the department did not really exist. It was an exercise on paper. The History and Philosophy of Science had been named as a department by then for well over a decade, but there just was no content to it. I didn't even have a faculty office on campus.

Sturchio:

You did have a couple of colleagues, though, when you arrived?

Thackray:

It was disconcerting to find that John Heilbron had left. Philip George, a research biophysical chemist, was pinch-hitting as interim chair. The two actual faculty were Russell McCormmach (who soon left for Johns Hopkins) and John Bennett, who was finally let go after six unfruitful years. Because of Penn's balkanized nature, there was never any question of teaching undergraduates. However, from my naive youthful perspective, they distracted from a research focus, so if they weren't present, that was quite okay.

The subject was buoyant everywhere else: membership of the History of Science Society was growing, as was attendance at its annual meeting. The first such meeting I went to, just after Christmas 1967, was actually in Toronto, showing a growing North American reach. I was stunned that 200 people were present and parallel sessions were happening. In England, it was a miracle if you had 20 people get together for a meeting! Being in the United States was like playing tennis at Wimbledon. In England, you were playing in the local park. And if you are a professional tennis player, Wimbledon is infinitely more interesting. Appropriately, I found myself besieged by invitations to visit and give talks.            

Over the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, the discipline itself has a new structure and narrative, looking for and finding in Conant's formulations the perfect approach: a highly intellectual focus to the key concepts of an alleged 17th-century scientific revolution, as yet almost wholly unexplored. The manuscript remains were available in agreeable European libraries, scattered from Paris and Pisa to Copenhagen and Oxford. Lifetimes looking at manuscripts would be a new approach, but the stuff was there.

The necessary accompanying miracle was engineered at the start of the 1950s by the person who would later enable the start of Penn's real activity, Richard Shryock at the American Philosophical Society. He organized the meeting at which the newly-established National Science Foundation registered its interest in the social sciences. The brilliant answer of the physicists and chemists who dominated NSF thinking was "oh, we know what social science is – it is the history and philosophy of science itself!" Funding for the field thus became the first venture of the NSF into social science waters.

Thanks to Shryock, NSF called on leading scholars of "HPS" at places like Harvard, Wisconsin, and so on, to meet at APS in Philadelphia and decide how NSF money should be used. The answer, amazingly, was "research grants for faculty to go to Paris and Pisa and Copenhagen and Cambridge and study the great minds from Copernicus to Darwin." What was not to like? The decision reinforced the ethos of the new field. Alexandre Koyré was by then regularly spending half of each year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton pontificating to American colleagues on how science was "essentially theoria, a search for the truth." That mantra and NSF money supplied the fuel as the discipline lit up. Universities assisted the bonfire by recruiting faculty and advanced students, and everyone began having a good time.

Penn missed out! In actuality, it was not a university but rather a cluster of a dozen or more fiercely independent schools, each pursuing its own version of reality.  The Dean of the College, who was in charge of undergraduate males, told me when I inquired that the subject was not suitable for undergraduates. Truly, there was a strange set of things to begin to understand. What I did not yet realize, but began to grasp empirically, was that I am really–as I later formulated it–a builder, not a maintenance man. And Penn was an interesting construction site because, metaphorically, piles of concrete and bricks and cement and timber were everywhere, once you saw and could figure out how to use them. The puzzle was in understanding the opportunity.

While Britain had an organized, classified social structure, America was a melting pot. Who knows what was bubbling in the pot? It was a time of radical change and in contrast to today, the subject was growing at a rapid rate. Undergraduates were pouring in. Additional teachers were needed. And if you were in the inner intellectual circles, life was good because there was always a possibility of an alternative offer from another university if your home base wasn't showing due appreciation of you.

Sturchio: 

You did get an offer to go back to Harvard, didn’t you?   

Thackray:

Yes. That was absolutely typical of the Harvard department. Let me sketch the background. George Sarton became a cultured Belgian refugee during World War I. The Widener Library was newly opened, with plenty of rooms in the basement. Sarton simply camped there. President Conant, aware of him in the 1930s, regularized his position with a lecturer's appointment. Returning from World War II sobered by his central role in the creation and use of the atomic bomb, Conant found his new calling.

The group of postdocs he recruited to help him as his teaching assistants included mainly physicists and chemists, like Thomas Kuhn and Leonard Nash. Bernard Cohen was somewhere on the fringes. History of science took off at Harvard. And in those days, what Harvard did today, the rest of academe did tomorrow. So the history of science flourished and was expanding and hot.

Harvard, like most programs at the time, didn't have an historian of chemistry. After all, chemistry was only invented by Lavoisier and Dalton, so if you're focused on 1500 to 1800, there isn't too much to talk about. The thinking was maybe one day we'll get somebody in that field, but not right now. I first met Cohen in 1965, when he showed up in Cambridge because of his interest in Newton and the Newton manuscripts. Since I was actually working on those manuscripts, I knew plenty that Bernard Cohen didn't. In my brash young way, I was eager to correct him. 

Harvard itself was looking for another faculty member. They had Arabic science, medieval science, and Conant and Everett Mendelson in scientific revolution studies up through 1800. Cohen decided he wanted to bring me back to Harvard, following my first stint there. It took him a couple of years to work through the institutional machinations to make me an offer of a permanent position. By then I had been at Penn for more than a year, and was very aware that I was up against all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles and challenges when trying to take action. But there's nothing like walking into the Office of the Dean or of the Provost and saying "By the way, I've received this letter from Harvard offering me an associate professorship. What should I do?"

Suddenly, by the first of July 1970, I had essentially obtained tenure and became the chair of my own department at Penn. I had permission to hire, and the university, incidentally and accidentally and wonderfully, was in process of itself hiring a new president with the express mission of making one university out of its mob of independent schools of everything you've ever thought of. In the end, it only took the university two centuries after its foundation to create a Faculty of Arts and Sciences!

The new vogue became to connect places like the engineering school and the medical school and the business school to the arts and sciences. I quickly understood that my subject was a natural area for linkages. It connected medicine and history and business and the sciences. The experience of my Manchester youth, living in the world created by the Industrial Revolution, clearly showed that the techno-sciences connected with the world in complicated ways. I was finding my feet and resisting the classic view of the affiliation of history and philosophy of science for a new view of the social history of science, technology, and medicine.

There was also an attempt to lure me back to Churchill College, Cambridge, but by then I was aware that playing tennis at Wimbledon was just more fun!

Sturchio:

The offer from Harvard gave you the leverage for promotion to tenure at Penn. Then in 1970, Philip George going to Persia offered the opportunity for you to become chair of the department. Can you tell us about your developing ideas of what the department would do? In the fall of 1969 you gave a talk at the conference on historical and philosophical perspectives of science in Minneapolis. "Science: has its present past a future?" opened with the observation that "to judge from the pages of Isis, the atom has not yet been split." That was just the beginning of your manifesto about a new way of articulating the history of science.

Thackray:

The thing that only becomes apparent when one leaves is that growing up in Manchester gives you a certain view of history.

The Industrial Revolution was a huge, complex event, transforming village life, rural ways and small-scale activity like handloom weaving into "grim Satanic mills" and multitudes of factory slaves. It was real and profound. In the center of Manchester, in the principal city square, the statue of John Dalton (1766–1844) of chemical atomic theory fame, would come to stand. He exemplified the grassroots of science and technology as teachable, transmittable, important events. That was all there in my background. I perceived Philadelphia, America's historically leading industrial city, as fundamentally similar.

Benjamin Disraeli would famously say “what Manchester thinks today, London thinks tomorrow." Manchester had been built on entrepreneurship. Philadelphia was in a similar position in the American pantheon. “This is where the Revolution took place. This is where the first medical school on the continent was established. This is where Benjamin Rush became the first professor of chemistry in North America. This is where the first business school was founded. And, you know, this is history."

So it was natural to begin to think of a new approach to the history of science focused on the modern era and the social impact of science. This is what lay behind the decision to change our department's name from History & Philosophy of Science to History & Sociology of Science. I also had an implicit awareness of entrepreneurship. My father had ended his career as the last man standing at a Manchester textile machinery company. He saw entrepreneurship in reverse, and the decay of that earlier impulse.

Thinking entrepreneurially about the constellation of American history of science departments turning out a flood of "scientific ideas" people, focused on the European origins of modern science—that was a market satisfied. It was no good trying to compete with Harvard and all the rest of them. The other thing that struck me as bizarre was how none was much interested in anything American, and certainly not in the Atomic Bomb. After all, who had made that bomb, and what made the USA world-dominant if not its technoscience leadership?

I very deliberately said "Number one, my own field is late 18th-century, hence I'll be the ancient historian of this department. Number two, America does exist and is central, so attention to the history of science in America has to be part of the deal. And number three, somewhere in all of this there are connections to engineering, technology, business, and medicine. So even though the answer that the present past does not have a future was correct, of course it went over like a lead balloon in Minneapolis. But since I was the youngest person speaking at the conference and the least known in the room, it certainly did stir things up!

Sturchio:

To pick up on one of the things you said, the Penn program had its origins through a Macy Foundation grant, which was in part for the history of medicine. Overtures to the medical school were one of the first elements of the program you began to develop. And then the engineers became important when one of your first major hires was Tom Hughes for the history of technology.

Thackray:

On the Penn campus, the engineers were delighted that someone from some non-engineering school was interested in what they did. ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer, was right there, and John Brainerd, an elderly Penn professor, was one of the people who actually worked on that project. He provided a natural entree to the engineers. And because of the university-wide effort stirred up by Martin Myerson, the new president, to implement the idea of one university, the dean of the medical school was also happy that a department in Arts and Sciences actually wanted to talk with him. And so it was.

One way round, it was easy once you decided to do this thing, which in 1968 was off the charts. No one was previously talking about integrating the University. Rather it was "me in my small comer, and you in yours."

Sturchio:

Then another element fell into place. You mentioned earlier that the Dean of the College for Men warned you away from undergraduates because the history of science wasn't a suitable subject for their young minds. By 1973, with Myerson having created the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, you were able to establish an undergraduate major. Wasn't that an important milestone in the early stages of the department's history?          

Thackray:

Absolutely. By then, I had understood that deans and administrators, in some fundamental sense, don't know what they're doing. They cannot possibly be expert in all their subjects, but they can easily watch two quite different indicators. One is: does anybody else want this faculty member? And what sort of grants, awards, and fellowships has he or she had? And oh, dread: actual offers from other places? The other indicator is the sheer arithmetic of undergraduate numbers, since tuition revenue is a powerful driver of what you can and cannot do.

This all led to my awareness of the need for a strong undergraduate major. Harvard had its thing in "history and science". Other places had all sorts of variations. Undergraduate majors, in the long term, were an important success factor for history of science programs. If you look at the Penn program over the 25-year period from 1970, by 1995 we had a very robust undergraduate major. So the deans were basically happy. Those two things are the real drivers of change. So as a faculty member, if you want progress, the questions to ask are either: is your undergraduate enrollment doing something impressive, or does somewhere else desire you?

The second part of this interview will be published in the July edition of the HSS Newsletter.

Jeffrey L. Sturchio has known Arnold Thackray for more than 50 years, first as a PhD student in the Department of History & Sociology of Science, then as Associate Director and Acting Director at the Center for the History of Chemistry from 1984 to 1988, and since as colleague, collaborator, and friend. After nearly 20 years at Merck & Co., Inc., beginning as the company’s historian and archivist in 1989 and eventually becoming Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and President of The Merck Company Foundation, Dr. Sturchio was President & CEO of the Global Health Council, then Chairman and CEO of Rabin Martin, a global health strategy firm. He is currently the Chairman of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, TB, and Malaria; Chairman of the International Society for Urban Health; and a Board member of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and the Science History Institute. He also serves as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University and a senior associate at the Global Health Policy Center of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

New Osiris Editors and Call for Submissions

Osiris is pleased to announce a new set of primary editors. Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna), Hugh Cagle (University of Utah), Prakash Kumar (Penn State), and Courtney Thompson (Mississippi State University) will serve as editors for the next five years.

Founded in 1936 by George Sarton, and relaunched by the History of Science Society in 1985, Osiris is an annual thematic journal that highlights research on significant themes in the history of science. Osiris is one of the five publications of the History of Science Society (the other four being Isis, the Isis Current Bibliography, the HSS Newsletter, and the online HSS Portal).

Osiris invites expressions of interest and volume proposals for Volume 45 (projected publication year 2030).

Osiris aims to connect the history of science with other areas of historical and interdisciplinary scholarship. Volumes of the journal are designed to explore how, where, and why science, broadly construed, draws upon and contributes to society, culture, and politics. The journal’s editors and board members strongly encourage proposals that engage with and examine broad themes while aiming for diversity across time and space. The editors are equally interested in receiving proposals that assess the state of the history of science as a field, in both established and emerging areas of scholarship. They also welcome proposals that experiment with format and style. Recent volumes have addressed animal mobilities; disability and the history of science; and algorithmic cultures. 

Pre-proposal:

Please send a 1-page expression of interest which includes a pitch of your idea and a list of potential collaborators by June 26, 2026 to osiris@hssonline.org. Osiris editors will be available to meet in July with those who have submitted expressions of interest, at the HSS meeting in Edinburgh or virtually. The Osiris editors are committed to provide feedback on these pre-proposals to make them competitive for the final round of selection. 

Full-volume proposal:

The closing date for the submission of full-volume proposals is November 13, 2026.

Your proposal should include the following items:

• A description of the topic and its significance (approximately 1500 words), especially highlighting the importance of the proposed volume to the history of science, broadly construed.
• A list of 12 to 15 contributors and essay title + succinct description (~ 150 words) of each contributor’s individual essay
• A one-page c.v. of the guest editor(s)

The proposal and all supporting materials should be submitted as a single PDF to osiris@hssonline.org with “Osiris vol. 45 Proposal” in the title.

The guest editor(s) and their contributors must be prepared to meet the Osiris publication schedule. Volume 45 will go to press—after refereeing, authors’ revisions, and copy-editing—in 2029. The general timeline for this process from the start is as follows: 

Proposal Deadline: November 2026

Proposal Acceptance: January 2027

First Drafts for Editorial Review due: January 2028

Editorial Review to Authors: March 2028

Revised Drafts for External Review due: July 2028

External Reviews to Authors: December 2028

Final Drafts due: September 2029

Copyediting: October 2029 – February 2030

Author Corrections: March 2030

Page Proofs: March 2030

Final Corrections: April 2030

Publication: May 2030 

The guest editor(s) should choose contributors who are aware of this production timeline and are able to submit their completed essays for editorial review by January 2028.

The final announcement of the next volume of Osiris will be made by January 2027. 

The new editors envision Osiris under their editorial tenure deepening our field’s geographical breadth, especially work focusing on Africa and East Asia, as well as highlighting scholarship that engages in thematic and methodological experimentation, including critical reflections on historical theory and method, such as engagement between history and anthropology, Marxist methodology, and science and identity.

How to Revolutionize Your Survey Course in the History of Science 

By Jörg Matthias Determann

During the academic year 2025/2026, I set out to teach a course that I thought would have been regularly offered at my university: HIST 393 Revolutions in Science II. The description in our Undergraduate Bulletin probably sounds familiar to historians of science at many colleges: “A survey of the history of science from 1800 to the present, focusing on the development of scientific ideas, practices and institutions in Western society.” This three-credit semester-long course is also cross-listed as a Science, Technology and Society (SCTS) class, thus serving students beyond the Department of History. With over 29,000 students enrolled across Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I assumed that at least one section of such a general history of science course would fill up almost every year.

To my surprise, what I thought was a regular offering had been rarely on the books in recent years. My colleagues in the Department of History explained to me that they had thought of revising this  survey class before placing it on the schedule again. With the title “Revolutions in Science,” it engaged with a long-standing historiographical framework, that of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms. Although Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was over sixty years old, my colleagues thought that students could still learn from it and from the literature that built on it. More problematic were the contents that pulled on the outdated “Plato to NATO” model. Indeed, HIST 393 is the continuation of HIST 392 Revolutions in Science I, which offers “a survey of the history of science from the ancient Greeks to 1800.”

Because the formal curricular approval processes at VCU, like those at comparable institutions, can be lengthy and bureaucratic, I kept the course name and description. Nonetheless, after fruitful exchanges with my colleagues, I thus re-envisioned the contents. In my version of the course, “Revolutions in Science” covered not just the emergence of new scientific ideas and models, but also social transformations. Such “social revolutions” and “inclusion revolutions” comprise histories of activism and struggles over access, representation, and justice. I thus gave special emphasis to histories of women, people of color, those with non-Western origins, queer people, and disabled people in the history of science. This included the biographies of Nobel laureates like Marie Curie and Abdus Salam as well as those whose groundbreaking scientific contributions or social activism went unrecognized in their lifetimes. The first page of my syllabus contained a photograph of the chemist Rosalind Franklin who received her awards and honors posthumously.

Rosalind Franklin with microscope in 1955 (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology)

A focus on “scientific ideas, practices and institutions” remained part of the official course description, so I did not and could not turn this survey into pure social history. Students thus continued to learn about the emergence of major theories and models in the life and physical sciences. At the beginning of my class, we studied the development of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and its global reception. Next, we explored Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the invention of the atomic bomb. After that, we traced the story of genetics from Gregor Mendel to the Human Genome Project. I expected course participants from any major to learn the scientific concepts in all these revolutions, assigning them historical research papers as primary sources.

Nevertheless, while students learned about key thinkers, I tried to situate them within changing social and political structures. For Charles Darwin, this meant the context of Victorian society and the British Empire. For Albert Einstein, we examined the rise of fascism and antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century. We also investigated how the mass media had created the myth of the lone genius at a time when “Big Science” emerged. In telling the history of genetics, we analyzed the multiple factors that led to the underappreciation of Rosalind Franklin compared with her male collaborators.

There may be limits when it comes to reframing revolutions in science as social revolutions. Working at an American university, I am well aware of the heightened political sensitivity of discussions of gender and race. At the same time, my classroom was far more diverse than in Darwin’s, Einstein’s, or Franklin’s times. In the face of restrictions on the promotion of diversity and inclusion, we historians can nonetheless include a greater representation of women and minorities in our courses. Demographic changes in science and higher education, of course, are never the result of a few great men and their ideas alone.

Jörg Matthias Determann teaches history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He is the author of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Astronomy: A Modern History (Springer, 2023). He thanks Jeanne Vaz for commenting on a previous version of this essay. He is further grateful to Sam Franz for helpful edits and to Summer Bateiha, Karen Rader and John Powers for valuable exchanges about pedagogy.

History of Science at the AAAS

By Jane Maienschein and Betty Smocovitis

We both have been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Board of Directors, Jane serving 2022-2025 and Betty 2023-2026. Starting in 2026, Jane has also been appointed to a new position as Historian and Advisor for AAAS (Figure 1).

Jane Maienschein newly appointed as historian and advisor to AAAS.

We feel privileged to serve in these roles as we learn so much about the organization, its purpose, its many activities, and about the role that science itself plays in society more generally. Though it is based in Washington, DC, the organization has become more international in scope, including membership from all over the world. It is at the forefront of science diplomacy and other efforts to build bridges between international agencies and organizations. The Board itself consists of a diverse group of wonderfully talented people. We have been gratified at how often they explicitly invite and always welcome our historical perspectives and insights. Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the AAAS, has been especially keen on history of science. When Jane first joined, the Board was updating its mission and vision statements, following a several-year effort by a committee on which Betty served to modernize the governance and goals of the organization.

Jane Maienschein, Sudip Parikh (CEO of AAAS) and Betty Smocovitis at the President's Reception, Arizona, 2026.

Founded in 1848, and originally modelled after the British Association for the Advancement of Science that was founded in 1831, the organization has evolved, now playing a more international role in the advancement of science.  As it stands now, the organization’s  mission is to: “Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all.” Its vision statement says that the AAAS is: “A boldly inclusive, mobilized, and global scientific community that ignites, enables, and celebrates scientific excellence and science-informed decisions and actions.”  Not all historians are entirely comfortable about “advancing” all science. Most of us in fact see ourselves as critics when needed. But, having been part of the AAAS organization for a very long time, we believe that emphasis on the “benefit to all” to be sincere and infused throughout the organization. The AAAS views inclusivity as a foundational value. Here, we point to areas where our organizations intersect and complement each other, with opportunities for the Society and individual members. 

The History of Science Society has been an affiliate of the AAAS for decades, having joined to promote shared interests. Starting in 1960, the HSS has also co-sponsored the George Sarton Memorial Lecture at the annual AAAS meeting. René Dubos presented “Science and the Public” at that first event, and the roster of speakers is available here. We each attended our first AAAS meetings while graduate students with our fathers and we both have many vivid memories of the Sarton Lecture. Jane attended her first AAAS meeting in 1977, and heard Jane Oppenheimer’s Sarton Lecture on “A Biologist Looks at History.” She was inspired to learn more about the AAAS as well as about the speaker, whose talk was attended by hundreds with a flock of reporters swarming Oppenheimer afterwards. When Jane had the privilege of presenting the lecture in 1996, she had the same experience. Betty was lucky enough to attend Derek de Solla Price’s famous “Sealing wax and string: a philosophy of the experimenter’s role in the genesis of high technology” in 1983, and recalls being struck by the lecture and the enthusiasm of hundreds of audience members. The recent 2025 lecture by Peter Galison, Harvard University, on "Visualizing Space/Time/Matter: Physics, Film, and History" continued this tradition that provides HSS with a valuable forum to reach out to a diverse audience of scientists, science educators, and writers, offering the diverse attendants at the AAAS meeting the opportunity to appreciate the importance of history.

Peter Galison delivering the Sarton Lecture at the 2025 AAAS meeting in Boston, Massachusetts

The 2026 lecture titled “America’s Cold War Science Experiment” delivered by Oregon State University’s Jacob Darwin Hamblin, drew a lively audience keen on learning more about the political context of science, and especially about science as a form of “soft power”.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin Delivering the Sarton Lecture at the 2026 AAAS Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona

Yet another connection between HSS and AAAS comes in the work of the AAAS’s Section L, the History and Philosophy of Science (there are twenty-four sections in the organization largely following disciplinary categories). Each section is run by a set of elected officers, whose primary task is to manage the section, making sure that our voices are heard in policies endorsed by AAAS. HSS member Susan Lindee serves as the current section chair. HSS Secretary and Smithsonian Institution Air and Space Museum Curator Matt Shindell began his experience in Washington, D.C. as an AAAS intern and recently served as a section L officer. The sections also organize symposia  for the annual meeting along with the important task of nominating and electing AAAS Fellows. Members of both HSS and the Philosophy of Science Association have held leadership positions in Section L, and many members have been elected. In addition, many historians of science have been elected as AAAS Fellows (see current Fellows here, and historic fellows here, including George Sarton elected in 1921). Eligibility requires membership in AAAS, with a number of organizations now offering institutional memberships (Information can be found here as well as discounts offered for students and digital memberships).

AAAS publishes Science magazine and the Science family of journals. They offer a free daily digest, which offers informative updates, news, and provocative discussions, and to which anybody can subscribe. Science Advances includes historical articles on a wide range of topics. And the modest number of book reviews often include history and philosophy of science topics, which the editors regard as holding wide interest. Here again there are many opportunities for our community to reach international communities of scientists, policy makers, and others interested in science and its history and contexts.We invite readers to think of possible policy pieces, letters to the editor, or contributions to the family of journals. 

Historians of science have also played many critical roles with AAAS over the decades. Keith Benson headed a History Committee to plan events for the AAAS 150th anniversary in 1998. That led to a volume by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael Sokal, and Bruce Lewenstein, each of whom had played leadership roles in HSS and the AAAS, that was titled The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Rutgers University Press, 1999). “They did not require us to produce a laudatory book, so there are plenty of warts here," says Lewenstein in an interview about the book at Cornell University. "Yes, we also wrote about the good things. But basically we were allowed to say what we thought had happened in the association, and that's important. It helps the book get beyond that dull institutional history." (See David Brand, “Lively book by three noted historians of science traces 150 years of AAAS history with 'plenty of warts',” Cornell Chronicle February 17, 2000).

Celebrating the Ties between HSS and AAAS after Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s Sarton Lecture (J.P. Gutierrez, Betty Smocovitis, Soraya de Chadarevian, Matthew Shindell, Richard Creath, Jane Maienschein and Jake Hamblin).

Others have worked with the AAAS’s excellent programs in science education, religion and science, law and society, ethics and science, SciLine, and other efforts to help inform the press and an increasingly diverse public about science. HSS members including James Fleming have served as AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows, working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Such activities have also proven transformative and crucial in wider political contexts, and are needed now, more than ever, given the recent challenges facing the scientific community. 

We close by encouraging you to join us in this collaborative and interdisciplinary work. There are many committees (and subcommittees) as well as leadership roles that need our help as historians of science. Scientific organizations such as the AAAS need historians of science to provide historical perspectives and the valuable context to important policy-making decisions today.

Outstanding Service Award Announcement

We are overjoyed to announce that Gwen Kay, former Treasurer of the History of Science Society, is the recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Service Award. Gwen’s commitment to the Society and its mission exemplifies the dedicated service to our community that this award was established to recognize.

Gwen served as Treasurer of the Society for four terms, from 2017 to 2024. The Society Treasurer is a demanding position. Not only does the Treasurer deal with everyday financial matters, but they must plan and design the annual budget, meet with the Financial Committee to discuss the contents of the budget, work closely with the Executive Office on operational expenditures, participate in the many meetings and decision-making processes of the Executive Committee, and prepare the documents for the annual external audit. To be sure, all elected positions of the History of Science Society demand a significant amount of labor. What distinguishes Gwen’s contributions are her effective and compassionate steering of the Society’s finances during the turbulent years of 2020-2024.

Through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, everything felt brittle. Gwen’s guiding hand steadied the Society. She patiently explained complex budget matters and decisions, ensuring that members felt fully-informed. Gwen worked to make resources available for urgent expenses without compromising the Society’s long-term financial stability, including the creation of a hardship fund to address members’ emergency needs. Gwen found ways to fund the rapidly changing needs of the Society’s publications as well, providing support that allowed its journals to maintain their quality and meet publication deadlines when so many others faltered. She demonstrated a true commitment to the values of our community, fostering its inclusivity and nurturing members’ professional growth in adverse circumstances.

The Society’s operational continuity has been possible because of Gwen’s steadfast dedication. Through unexpected personnel transitions in 2021, Gwen calmly stepped up to devote significant time to onboarding the new Executive Director and Vice-President. From 2022-2023, there were many complex and ambitious projects, including the HSS Centennial events and the planning of the 2024 HSS Centennial Meeting in Mérida, Mexico. Gwen took all this in stride, balancing the exceptional nature of the Centennial with fiscal responsibility. In addition to her role as Treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee, Gwen has also provided counsel to the Development Committee, twice served on the Pauly Prize subcommittee, and continues to serve on the Financial Committee. In her last year as Treasurer, she kindly mentored the new Treasurer, Emily Hamilton, who successfully assumed responsibilities in a smooth transition. 

Gwen’s dedication and steady financial guidance made it possible for the History of Science Society to thrive these last many years. Gwen has always been a pleasure to work with; she is a model of collegiality and collaborative leadership. She is generous, wise, even-tempered, and creative in solving problems. She will inspire her successors with her example of conscientious service. And she leaves the Society a legacy of sound financial management that prioritizes the needs of the members. We can imagine no one more deserving of this award.

Sarton Medalist Announcement

HSS is pleased to announce the 2026 Sarton Medalist, Lynn Nyhart.

Nyhart is Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, having previously served as the Robert E. Kohler Professor of History of Science. She has published or edited several books and volumes and written numerous articles in the history and philosophy of biology, including Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900; Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany; and most recently Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. She has supervised dozens of graduate students, and has accepted many service roles in the professional history of science. Her achievements have been widely recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nyhart’s work is preeminent in the history of biology. Her first book, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900, masterfully charted the intellectual, economic, and institutional influences of morphology on the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Her later book, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany won the Susan Abrams Prize and recovered a tradition of ecological thinking that complicated our understanding of natural history as a practice of classification. Her scholarship has become foundational for the history of biology and is widely read by students in the field. Moreover, she has long created space for collaboration between historians, philosophers, and biologists, culminating in her interdisciplinary volume Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives.

Nyhart has a long record of service to her home institution and the history of science as a professional field. She has served as the Chair of her department at the University of Wisconsin twice, and has held leadership positions in the University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Within HSS, she has served as President, organized the conference program, run the nominations committee, and has served on multiple editorial boards and fellowship review panels. She has mentored and influenced countless students and junior scholars who now are leading scholars in the history of science.

Her careful scholarship, long record of service, and interdisciplinary organizing efforts make her a model for future historians of science and a highly deserving recipient of the Sarton Medal.

Letter from the President

Dear HSS community, 

These are challenging times for many of us, and sometimes it is not easy to discern the way ahead – or, for that matter, write a presidential letter. The question of what HSS can do to respond to these challenges is foremost on my mind. Science, technology, and medicine are implicated in many ways – from changes in funding schemes and the role of science in policy and politics to new ways of waging wars and flirting with environmental disasters. Future historians will pore over this period, but what can we do now to confront these multiple crises? How can we come out of them stronger?  I hope that we can address these and other questions together when we meet in Edinburgh. 

Currently, most of our efforts are focused on getting the HSS/ESHS meeting, co-hosted by the BSHS in Edinburgh, off the ground. This will be a truly joint meeting with a common opening plenary and a common reception, including an unmissable ceilidh, at the National Museum of Scotland. My hope is that these shared spaces will lead to many meaningful exchanges and lasting new connections between members of these sibling societies. 

On a related note, I am delighted to announce that Lynn Nyhart has been awarded the Sarton Medal for 2026. This is the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society and honors a scholar for lifetime scholarly achievement. HSS has also awarded Gwen Kay the Outstanding Service Award. She has served as Treasurer for the Society from 2017-2024 and has dedicated a huge amount of time and care to keep the Society’s finances in balance. I extend my heartfelt congratulations to both. The ceremony for both awards will take place at the Edinburgh meeting. All other HSS prize winners will be announced on the same occasion. 

Besides all the planning that goes into the Edinburgh meeting, HSS had a substantive presence at the AAAS meeting in Phoenix in February, where Jacob Hamblin gave the Sarton Lecture on “America’s Cold War Science Experiment” to a full audience. The lecture grappled with the legacies of and the current challenges to the Cold War science infrastructure, which generated a lively discussion. HSS also sponsored a well-attended session on “AI’s Potential Through a Historical Lens,” co-organized by Jonathan Coopersmith and Barbara Hahn, that led to an interesting discussion on what history can contribute to current policy debates around AI. You can read more on HSS's long-standing engagement with AAAS in the article by Jane Maienschein and Betty Smocovitis in this newsletter. They encourage HSS members to join Section L, the History and Philosophy of Science section, and engage with AAAS as an important forum to interact with scientists and provide historical expertise to science-policy making. 

You will all have seen the announcements for the new HSS Dissertation Travel Grant, for the support of research trips, generously funded by a donation of longstanding HSS member Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, and the Mary Terrall Fund, set up by friends and colleagues in Mary’s honor, which provides support for scholars who experience a temporary moment of financial precarity. While federal funding opportunities continue to be threatened and departmental funds are more difficult to get hold of, HSS is happy to be able to offer these new grant opportunities.   

The new Osiris editorial team started their five-year term in January. The editors are Prakash Kumar (Penn State), Courtney Thompson (Mississippi State), Hugh Cagle (University of Utah), and Monica Azzolini (Università’ di Bologna). HSS thanks both the outgoing team, including Elaine Leong, Myrna Perez Sheldon, and Ahmed Ragab, and the incoming team for their dedication and commitment. 

Finally, I look forward to attending the ACLS regional gathering that will take place at UCLA at the end of March. ACLS has been making a strong case for the support of the Humanities, including filing a case to restore the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) previous function and funding and fostering connections between different societies for higher resilience. 

For sure, together we are stronger. 

If you have concerns or ideas about what HSS can be doing to help our members, we are keen to hear them. Thank you for being part of HSS.

Soraya de Chadarevian 

HSS President 

Member News

Raffaele Pisano and Paolo Bussotti compiled and edited the theme issue of Philosophical Transactions A:  “Newton, Principia, Newton Geneva Edition (17th–19th) and modern Newtonian mechanics: heritage, past & present,” recently published by the Royal Society. The articles can be accessed directly at www.bit.ly/TransA2311. A print version is also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org. 

Jitse Vandermeer published  "Is Cuvier’s notion of perfection paradoxical?" Revue d’histoire des sciences 2025/2 (Tome 78) 437-460. Digital off-print: https://shs.cairn.info/tap-z3tylkx2j3fq2 (available until 01/16/2026 inclusive).

Roderick Home was awarded the Alexandre Koyré Medal for 2025 by the International Academy of the History of Science.

Donald Opitz published three articles, including: 

(1) Opitz, D. L., and Van Tiggelen, B. “To ‘Make a Fuss’: Gender and Governance in the Historiography of Science and Technology.” In: Lémonon-Waxin, I, and Dufaud, G. (eds.), Women, Gender, and Technosciences, 1900–2020: A Beard to Govern (pp. 23–34), London: Routledge, 2025. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003562597-3/make-fuss-donald-opitz-brigitte-van-tiggelen

(2) Teharlev Ben-Shachar, E., and Opitz, D. L. (eds.), “Ceres: Gendered Histories of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences.” Special issue of Endeavour 49 (June 2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/10ZT6788FHQ

(3) Opitz, D. L., “In Memoriam: Margaret Walsh Rossiter, Pathbreaker in ‘Writing Women into Science’,” AIP History Newsletter (October 24, 2025). https://www.aip.org/history/in-memoriam-margaret-rossiter. Expanded for the Commission on Women and Gender in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (October 27, 2025): https://agnodike.org/margaret-rossiter/

(4) Opitz, D. L.“Philosophy and Science: Or, the Technoscience of Gender,” in Adrian Bingham (ed.), A Cultural History of Gender in the Contemporary World (pp. 23–40). London: Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/cultural-history-of-gender-9781350336933/

John Krige was awarded SHOT's Leonardo da Vinci Medal for 2025. It is presented to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the history of technology, through research, teaching, publications, service to the Society, and other activities.

Javier Poveda-Figueroa delivered a talk at ICHST 2025 related to the role Pedro Vicente Maldonado played on the Hispano-French Geodesic Mission to prove Newton's claim about the shape of the Earth in eighteenth-century Real Audiencia de Quito.

Dieter Kempkens has published a new essay. Die Zeitgeschichtsschreibung über die Amerikanische Revolution bis 1789, in: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte/ Journal for Cultural History Vol. 106 (2024), 2, P. 406-440. Ill. English abstract.

Comparison of nine American, English, French and German contemporary historians

Dieter Kempkens has published a new essay. Die Zeitgeschichtsschreibung über die Amerikanische Revolution bis 1789, in: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte/ Journal for Cultural History Vol. 106 (2024), 2, P. 406-440. Ill. English abstract.

Comparison of nine American, English, French and German contemporary historians

Hans J. Haubold published the history of neutrino astronomy in the period from 1974 to 2024 as developed before and after reunification of Germany, particularly reflected in letters shown in Chapter 4. A.M. Mathai and H.J. Haubold, Modern Problems in Nuclear and Neutrino Astrophysics, Springer, New York and Heidelberg, 2025, Open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-83387-8

This is an addition to the history of the development of multi-messenger astronomy in Germany as described in the outstanding book publication by L. Bonolis and J.-A. Leon, Astrophysics, Astronomy and Space Sciences in the History of the Max Planck Society, Brill, Berlin, 2022, Open access: https://brill.com/display/title/59720, particularly reflected in footnote 420/144.

Clelia Crialesi published a book, Mathematics and Philosophy at the Turn of the First Millennium: Abbo of Fleury on Calculus, Routledge; and an edited volume, Premodern Mathematical Thought: The Latin Discussio (13th–16th Centuries), Brill.

Seth Rasmussen published an article, "From Regnault to Baumann: The Early History of Poly(vinyl chloride)" in the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry (10.70359/bhc2025v050p093); two book chapters, "History of Conjugated and Conducting Polymers: Myths and Misconceptions" in Springer Handbook of Functional Polymers (10.1007/978-981-96-2498-0_8), and "Alfred Werner: Coordination Theory and the Stereochemistry of Metal Complexes" in The Birth of the 3rd Dimension in Chemistry (10.1007/978-3-031-97743-5_4), as well as his latest monograph How Glass Changed the World: Revised and Expanded (Springer, 2026).

Gabrielle Graham's tenure with the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences has ended. Beginning in 2017, Graham built a structured approach to engaging in informal and formal information exchange between the Buffalo Museum of Science and residents and organizations of Buffalo, NY and specifically the immediate neighbors in the East Side. Graham will continue to reside in Buffalo and will be actively engaged with community organizers in social health and place-based relations.

Christine Keiner, chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Rochester Institute of Technology, published “The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970” in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge, exploring the theme “Knowledge and Power: Projecting the Modern World.” [https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/19175] She also authored two essays in The Conversation: "Coastal economies rely on NOAA, from Maine to Florida, Texas and Alaska – even if they don’t realize it" and "Erie Canal’s 200th anniversary: How a technological marvel for trade changed the environment forever." [https://theconversation.com/coastal-economies-rely-on-noaa-from-maine-to-florida-texas-and-alaska-even-if-they-dont-realize-it-250016 and https://theconversation.com/erie-canals-200th-anniversary-how-a-technological-marvel-for-trade-changed-the-environment-forever-263320] 

Leib Celnik published a chapter, “The Smithsonian Institution and the Rise of the American Conservation Laboratory after the Second World War” in the recent edited volume The Invention of Scientific Conservation: Expert Cultures of Conservation after the Second World War (Brill). The publisher highlighted his chapter as a special feature at:[https://link.growkudos.com/1er85ryz4lc]

Surekha Davies published “Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?” in Contingent Magazine (Dec. 31, 2025, online: print; audio), reflecting on the archival and methodological origins of her books, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge UP) and Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). She recently published essays and op-eds in Smithsonian, the LA Times, Aeon, Reactor, and Pasts Imperfect. She will be giving a lecture on Humans: A Monstrous History (one of History Today’s Best Books of the Year 2025) at the Linnean Society, London, on Thursday March 5th at 6pm. The book is now also available in traditional Chinese from Gusa Publishing (Taiwan). For links to events and publications and Surekha’s free newsletter, “Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian,” visit www.surekhadavies.org.

Membership Renewal 2026

The 2026 membership renewal season is nearly over. As a reminder, the History of Science Society membership runs on the calendar year, with memberships expiring on the last day of December. If you have yet to renew for 2026, you can still access the HSTM Database, Isis, and Osiris through the grace period, which ends February 28th. 

When you’re ready to renew for 2026, visit hssonline.org and log in with your username and password. If you’ve forgotten your password, you can request a reset email on the login page. As you might remember, Council voted to revise our member dues structure in November 2023, and the new structure is as follows, with income based in US dollars:

If your income or circumstances have changed since last year, you can select a new tier during the renewal process. There’s also a new question in your member profile to consider. Under Additional Information is a space to note your interest in being a Mentor or Mentee. There are multiple options to choose from, so take a look and select the option to note your interest. You can always change your selection in your profile.

When you’re ready to renew for 2026, log in to your Member Profile at https://hssonline.org/login.aspx and select Renew Now. Select the appropriate dues tier. After checkout, you’re ready for another year of HSS membership! 

Did you graduate or retire? Congratulations! If your member type (Student, Individual, Retired) has changed, please email me directly at morgan@hssonline.org, so this change can be applied to your profile. If any questions arise during the renewal process, these can also be sent to me.

Your membership supports HSS annual meetings, all of our publications, and the community at large. Thank you for continuing to be a part of HSS.

Morgan Valenzuela

Manager of Member Services

HSS Dissertation Research Travel Grant

Through a generous initial donation from Dr. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, and the support of HSS members who helped raise additional funds, HSS will soon be opening applications for the new Dissertation Travel Grant.

Remembering very well the importance of travel and fellowship support for her own early research, Dr. Kohlstedt wanted to enable students to travel, here or abroad, to access resources that will enable and enhance their research. Support for graduate students doing dissertation research has become increasingly limited due to the constriction of funds available from governmental agencies, private foundations, universities, and graduate programs. 

The Dissertation Research Travel Grant is open to graduate student members in the history of science and technology who have completed all course work, passed their written and oral exams, and are working on a dissertation proposal or on their dissertation itself. 

We want to thank everyone who donated to this fund to make this first year of support possible.

If you would like to support the continuation of this grant you can donate to the Dissertation Research Travel Grant Fund on the HSS website or mail a check to: 

History of Science Society

PO Box 695

Culver City, CA 90232

USA

Eligible student members can apply on the HSS website

Message from Graduate and Early Career Caucus (GECC)

Dear Graduate and Early Career Scholars,

It was wonderful to meet many new colleagues at HSS 2025 in New Orleans and to see such strong participation with the Graduate and Early Career Caucus (GECC)!

For those of you who do not know who we are, GECC aims to foster a welcoming, supportive community where graduate students and early-career scholars in the history of science can meet, share ideas, and navigate the profession together. As an official caucus of the History of Science Society, we organize mentoring programs, professional development sessions, and social events at the annual meeting, and we are working to expand year-round programming.

GECC leadership comprises two co-chairs and three committees: Communications, Diversity, and Mentorship. Committee membership is open, and there is no limit to the number of members or years served, as long as individuals remain graduate students or early-career scholars. Terms last one year, with elections each January.

To stay connected, we encourage you to subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter and visit our page on the HSS website. Our WhatsApp group is another informal way to stay in touch throughout the year.

If you are interested in participating more actively in GECC, please complete this brief form.

We hope you will consider running for a position so that we can continue to support graduate students and early career scholars both at the annual meeting and throughout the year. Details about GECC’s structure and officer roles are included below.

GECC’s Structure

Co-Chairs
GECC has two co-chairs who serve staggered two-year terms to ensure continuity. This year, Claire Votava will be completing her term as senior co-chair, and MaryKate Wolken will continue into the second year of her term. A new co-chair will be elected in January.

Communications Officers
These officers maintain GECC’s online presence, distribute the newsletter, and keep members informed about GECC programming, especially events connected to the HSS Annual Meeting.

Diversity Officers
These officers represent member concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They work closely with the HSS Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity (CoDI), attend monthly CoDI meetings as ex-officio members, and help organize events such as the GECC listening session.

Mentorship Program Officers
These officers design and coordinate mentorship programs and professional development events. Recent examples include the Tacit Knowledge and Professionalization sessions and the Women’s Mentorship Event, often in partnership with other HSS caucuses.

Thank you again for being part of the GECC community. We look forward to staying in touch in the months ahead and hope to see many of you next year in Edinburgh!

Warmly,

Claire Votava and MaryKate Wolken

GECC Co-Chairs, on behalf of the GECC Team

How will Historians of Science Respond to the Downstream Effects of the (U.S.) Federal and State Attacks on STEM and Higher Education?

By Alix Hui, Judy Kaplan and Claire Sabel

On Friday of the 2025 History of Science Society Annual meeting in New Orleans, the room was full for a listening session entitled  “What the attacks on STEM research and education in the U.S. means for historians of science.”  We wanted to talk about how the Trump administration is breaking all the things we hold dear. The goal of the roundtable was listening and sharing, with some preliminary discussions of possible actions we could take together to challenge suppression of intellectual freedom in teaching and research, as well as more existential threats through funding cuts, lawsuits, and intimidation. We (Claire Sabel, Judy Kaplan, and Alix Hui) were pleased by both the turnout and diversity of institutions, career-stages, and types of positions represented by the attendees. Historians, archivists, department chairs, and editors from institutions big and small, public and private, U.S. and international attended and listened and shared. Common across the room was a sense of fear, hurt, and frustration, even as individual experiences varied widely. The specific stories offered were both dismaying and fortifying—currents of resistance to federal and state efforts to  dismantle the work of historians of science remain. We are grateful to the HSS annual meeting program chairs for permitting this roundtable as a “late-breaking” addition.

In the second week of December, we hosted an online follow-up meeting. Several of the original attendees joined us as did new faces who were not in New Orleans for the annual meeting. At this gathering, there was less venting and sharing of experience and instead a concrete discussion of the kinds of actions that we could take together. In that spirit, we list the takeaway points and provocations of both gatherings below, as well as the contours of a plan to move forward.

1. We need to temper our impulses to merely historicize. And also know that historicizing does not mean rendering events harmless.
   
2. Historical perspective and preservation is one of the key things historians can meaningfully contribute to public discourse and pedagogical practice. 
   
3. Historians of science have a unique perspective on the politicization of knowledge and truth-claims. What is it?
   
4. The fight for academic freedom is over and we have lost.
   
5. The fight for academic freedom is not over, and it is worth fighting for.
   
6. The fight that remains is institutional drift towards economically incentivized de-skilling (AI and Ed-Tech) and increasingly shameless rejection of truth and its value.
   
7. We can, with humility, look to scholars of marginalized groups—Black Studies and Disability Studies, for example—who have been fighting censorship and neglect for far longer. Similarly, scholars working in oppressive regimes outside the U.S. can offer insight.
   
8. We need clarity about what we want. More fundamentally, we need to figure out what entities we are and who our audience is. We suspect that the only audience for history of science is typically/only other historians of science. So, do we want a bigger, different audience? And if so, how do we build it?
   
9. What unique skills do we have as historians of science and how can we use them to respond to this moment? Perhaps the interdisciplinary nature of the history of science means that our audiences and interventions will necessarily be plural.
   
10. How can we document this moment? How can we build archives, conduct oral histories, and support data rescue projects?
    
11. What specifically can scholars in our field with secure, powerful positions do to protect the more vulnerable in our community? How do we encourage professional risk-taking?
    
12. What is the role of academic societies? Are others—AAHM, AHA—doing more or less right by their members? Can the history of HSS (in)action in previous political crises guide us?
    

We propose, for the moment, two lines of action. The first is a regular (monthly) online gathering in the form of a Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine working group. This working group will be devoted to sharing and training around various interventions, from building an archive of un-taught courses to working with AAUP. We anticipate launching the first meeting by February to focus on general planning. Subsequent meetings would be participant-led and devoted to such topics as: archiving, teaching and censorship, talking to scientists, truthiness, and discussion of the skills we have and skills we need. The second line of action is a regular public-facing “witnessing” installation, possibly bi-monthly to document the shifting ground in real time. This might be a short anonymized report of changes individuals are seeing at their institutions, state legislation going into effect, altered directions of research programs, and so on. These could be anonymized as needed. If you would like to get involved in either of these endeavors and be added to the list-serv for the CHSTM group, please contact Claire Sabel (claire.sabel@gmail.com), Judy Kaplan (jkaplan@sciencehistory.org), and Alix Hui (alixhui@gmail.com).

An Interview with Pamela Smith, 2025 Sarton Medalist

What first drew you to the history of science, and the history of alchemy in particular?

As an undergraduate, I started off as a science student in chemistry. I loved it, but when I took a history of science course on Greek Science to the Scientific Revolution, it opened my mind to the fact that science had a history. Alchemy was later, in graduate school, when I discovered Paracelsus, and I became fascinated with his ideas and with alchemy’s connection to embodied knowledge, to craft knowledge, and to the work of art broadly understood.

Were there any particularly influential or formative teachers and mentors along the way?

Well, I had lots to learn, really a huge amount. I read and read, spending the ‘80s in the library, as my grad cohort friend Michael Dennis used to say. My advisors in graduate school were Owen Hannaway and Mack Walker, both very narrative-driven historians. I see it as self-evident now that the historical method is about crafting a narrative. That's something I intuited but didn't really understand when I went to graduate school. Crafting a narrative entails whittling down the complexity of a past “real world” in a way that's authentic to that complexity. As a graduate student, I came to understand how much Owen and Mack loved narrative. I was a TA in Owen Hannaway's Scientific Revolution class; he could tell a story that kept the students riveted. That's very much how I first wrote my survey lectures–as a whole story (sometimes too much of the whole, which probably means that I didn’t whittle down the complexity enough!).

At my first position at Pomona College, I had a lot to learn about teaching intensive, small undergraduate classes. I learned a lot from my colleague there, Helena Wall, who is the model of an intellectual and a teacher. I also learned how to be a mentor from Lynn Hunt when she was at UCLA, a great scholar who is very invested in pedagogy. Raine Daston at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin was my model of leadership.

Of course, I learn a lot from my students. From my undergraduates, I learn everything that I know about most new cultural phenomena in the world today. And from my grad students I am always learning about new areas of research and new methodologies, which keeps me on my toes. I love collaborating with young scholars because I learn so much.

What makes a good collaboration successful?

You have to start with a substantive and intriguing object of study, and you have to bring many different people from a variety of disciplines together. Two examples: One is the Making and Knowing Project that had as its first object of study the very intriguing anonymous Ms Fr 640,  a sixteenth century manuscript containing techniques for making all kinds of art and everyday objects. The mystery of its anonymous compilation drew people in. One cannot read it straight through as it seems to have been largely notes made by the author-practitioner for himself. It needed deep, close reading and interpretation across material and textual research, from conservators and expert practitioners to digital scholars, among many others. My second example is from the Center for Science and Society at Columbia. One project organized conversations around a theme—causation, evidence, narrative. We put together a large organizing committee from different disciplines that resulted in wonderfully stimulating and deep conversations (not always the case when discussing across disciplinary divides). Co-teaching is another way to form truly substantive and collaborative conversations across disciplines.

For good collaborations, you have to put in the time to build community by building good relationships, which means huge amounts of listening, planning, and compromising!

What are some of the obstacles to successful collaboration or to building community?

Time is maybe the biggest one. Everybody is busy, and if you are grant-funded, you are typically on a short timeline. There’s the organizational component, different teaching agendas, different semester schedules, and so on. The second obstacle is just finding a place to do it. The Making and Knowing Lab was a great center of activity. I think institutions in general are moving slowly in thinking about collaboration as a desirable thing—collaboration among students, among faculty, among students and faculty—but I believe there are infrastructural aspects they haven'tconsidered that would enhance collaboration. 

Do you think that universities will adapt to support and value collaboration more?

I would say there is a lot of lip service paid, but it means changing everyday structures (e.g., class schedules), spaces of the university, as well as existential structures for promotion and tenure. Some institutions can do it more easily, such as small liberal arts colleges, but it's going to be difficult to change the structure of research universities. Although, who knows what will happen in our present situation!

I think attitudes to collaboration have changed to a certain extent in the climate sciences. Climate scientists seem more eager to collaborate with social scientists and humanities scholars. Their research was very successful in showing the speed and magnitude of climate change, but it didn't have the impact they might have wanted at the public level. At first, I would say that many climate scientists thought: we need better communication, how can we communicate better? They then went to the people who write narratives, the people who study human behavior. But I think now they are instead asking questions about the structure of science and scientific research itself and the roles that science plays in society that have led to the public ignoring or undermining their research.

How has an interest in climate change been part of the changing the direction of your work towards the history of mining and pre-modern industries?

It’s hard today not to feel that one should be researching something that matters to the future and the public. What historians of science can do is show that the development of science and scientific methods are historical processes, with causal factors that could have been otherwise. This allows our audiences to see that humans may indeed change the future course of history. I feel like we all need to live with that hope of being able to make change. This underpins my new research, which studies socio-natural sites of extraction, resources, and knowledge-making. I’ve had a long-standing interest in socio-natural interactions, in the sense that I view craft workshops of the early modern period as a site of human industry and human-material interactions. Now, in my research on “industryscapes” and “minescapes,” I want to understand the very long-term course of human industry on a large scale, something like a longue durée of “industryscapes” such as mine sites. In these sites we can perhaps trace a progression of attitudes to the natural world of materials or nature which can help us to understand how we came to where we are now.

Do you think the early modern period has something specific to say to the present in this regard?

It's key, in the sense that I think the three biggest factors are all early modern—colonialism, the development of capitalism as we know it now, and the development of the natural sciences.

Both Minescapes and the Making and Knowing Project are very hands-on, but also involve novel digital components and ways of presenting the research. How do you think about the relationship between digital and practical? 

I'm interested in embodied knowledge and hands-on work because it hasn't really been theorized. It doesn't have the body of writing around it that, say, textual or propositional knowledge has, in part because it's really hard to put into words. So, the digital environment and digital media make it possible to present embodied experience in the way it needs to be understood: in practice. It has to be taught by someone actually doing the gestures and making clear how you do it, showing you how to do it. You have to show making, not just talk (or write) about making. And you can do that through digital media, and scale it up from individual, personal knowledge to larger audiences. 

Pedagogy is so much a part of embodied knowledge. You have to have a teacher-guide. Teaching is what makes practical experiences able to be understood as knowledge. In the Making and Knowing Project it’s done through teaching hands-on historical techniques in the Lab, and in the Industryscapes project, it's taking students out into industrial sites to gain the experiential knowledge of walking and knowing the landscape. I think of it as equally pedagogy-driven research and research-driven pedagogy. 

What is the role of mentoring and teaching in your research? And can you share some specific examples of how cultivating connections with junior scholarshas informed your approach to the history of science?

I learn so much by engaging with younger scholars. I think that mentoring is required for the continuation of the field of history. I feel it's important for my own research, but it's even more important for the whole field and human life. I think I’m not wrong to say that my generation didn’t have very intentional mentoring as grad students. I guess in a way it was an apprenticeship, which is okay, but it was difficult not to receive much engagement from advisors with your work. The pedagogy-driven research of the Making and Knowing project proved to me how fruitful it was to organize all research in the form of a class. The postdocs and students were the generators of so much incredible thinking and work. You can see all their work in the essays and digital environment of Secrets of Craft and Nature.

Young scholars are also doing so much good, interesting, important work. My collaborator in Minescapes, Tina Asmussen, is a great example.

Your work has fostered a lot of dialogue between history of science and art history. Many other fields are increasingly engaging with the history of science and drawing from it. What you think that will do for the history of science? Is it reciprocal?

The history of science has expandedso greatly since the 1980s, in terms of what constitutes the subject matter. Who is a scientist and what constitutes science? This has included understanding the so-called occult sciences as knowledge systems, thinking about science as practice, and all the developments of understanding science as social. The social and historical study of science encompasses such a broad purview now.  

I think other fields recognize the large role that science plays in our world.In order to understand where we are now, they too need to study the structure and roles of science. As for what it will do for the history of science, I've always felt that the more the merrier! In some ways, this perspective informed the Making and Knowing Project: let’s just bring in more people and disciplinary perspectives!

What advice would you give to someone early in their career entering the field today?

Students going into the field should not feel they have to conform to an ideal professional mold. While I do think they should definitely join professional societies where they’ll meet lots of like-minded people and understand their field better, I mean that they should approach scholarship as play, the way you play a musical instrument. You have to practice and it's really hard work. It's not always fun but it allows one to learn to improvise and basically do what you want. 

I’ve been very fortunate to be able to feel like my work is play in that sense. The Body of the Artisan was my improvising from what I had learned before. I felt lucky to be able to study all those paintings and objects as my research. I would hope that young scholars can feel passion and confidence enough to approach their research that way.

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the local arrangements and program committees for the 2026 ESHS/HSS Joint Meeting in Edinburgh, we want to extend our profound thanks to all of those who submitted a proposal.

When we started planning for this conference, we aimed to host more participants than either society had ever previously welcomed in their regular meetings, and booked facilities based on the combined highest ever attendance from each. We can now share that submissions substantially exceeded these expectations. This is very exciting, but raises some challenges and questions for us as well as for everyone who hopes to present at the meeting. We hope to address some of these questions here.

From the start of planning we have consistently heard from both the ESHS and HSS communities that there is a shared priority of having as open and inclusive of a meeting as possible. To that end, the local team is in the process of securing additional space and preparing new logistical plans for the additional safety and welfare considerations a larger meeting would require.

To accommodate as many qualified presenters as possible, it will likely be necessary to modify some of the usual expectations about catering, session attendance, breaks, and other typical aspects of ESHS and HSS meetings. The overall conference timeline may also need to be adjusted slightly, most likely by expanding into part of the Sunday prior (12 July), and this will be confirmed by the time acceptances are notified. We recognize any adjustments come with costs and trade-offs, and we are working carefully to make an expanded conference as accessible and fruitful as possible for as many participants as we can responsibly manage.

Meanwhile, the program chairs and reviewers are making every effort to send timely acceptance decisions in February so that participants have enough time to make travel arrangements, secure visas, and plan their visits. Decisions will be based on a rigorous and fair process that is sensitive to the diversity of norms and priorities across the ESHS and HSS communities, following the criteria in the call for proposals. We know that appearing on the program is often essential for funding and other considerations.

A larger program will require making greater use of the wonderful city that surrounds the conference sites. The local team will provide extensive guidance on coffee, meals, affordable accommodation, and supplementary activities to help you make the most of your time in Edinburgh outside of formal sessions. We will endeavor to also live-stream and record plenary sessions to ease demand on the large-but-not-that-large lecture theaters we have reserved for these.

A bigger conference also means more opportunities to volunteer, and we encourage student participants to think ahead about committing some hours to helping the event run smoothly. Volunteering comes with waived registration fees and a great chance to interact from a different angle with the large and wonderful community of historians of science who will be coming to Edinburgh.

Questions can still be directed to info@hssonline.org, and we thank you for your patience as we ensure every query is addressed.

We are tremendously excited for this summer’s conference and thank you again for your interest in taking part!

Sincerely,

Edinburgh 2026 local and program committees

Letter from the President

Dear HSS community,

Starting my term as president, I would first like to thank Evelynn Hammonds for her leadership over the last two years. She reminded us over and over again that HSS needs to remain focused on the big questions related to our community and our field, a call that has become only more urgent, and one that I hope we will keep following. I am grateful that Evelynn will continue to be part of our efforts for the next two years as she stays on as immediate past-president, following Fa-ti Fan in this role. Secondly, I would like to thank you, the members of HSS, for the trust you have placed in me. I will certainly continue to need your trust and your support going forward. We can only do the work together. I also want to welcome Suman Seth as the new Vice-President/President-elect as we move forward together.

It is a challenging time for many in our community, especially but not only for those working in the US. The institutions in which we work and the very core of our work are under attack. We experience it or read about it on a daily basis, so I do not need to say much more here. Yet HSS is interested in collecting data to understand where our members are and how the new policies (in the US and internationally) affect our community with respect to grants, graduate student training, job opportunities, and more. You can help us by filling out the career pathways survey. More generally, withdrawing—although it might at times feel tempting—is not an option. It is my hope that the Society, together with our sister societies, can help us weather the storm both by thinking harder about how we can work together and how our work in academia and beyond can help to illuminate the current crisis and support the next generation. Surely we need more, not less, critical thinking and historical understanding of science and technology and its role in society and politics. 

Meanwhile, here are some of the points that the HSS Council discussed and agreed on in our last meeting in New Orleans. 

First, you will see more discussions of the work that many committees do to sustain the Society, including the annual meeting, the prizes, and its publications, reflected on the website. Check it out! More than 150 HSS members serve on Council, committees, task forces, and Forums. This is an enormous combined commitment. I extend a big thank you to everyone for their willingness to commit their time, energy, and ideas to make HSS a better society. There will also be more direct and frequent communication between Council and committees that will speed up some of the decision-making. 

Second, HSS joined the Scholars at Risk Network and expanded eligibility for our already existing Sponsor-a-Scholar program. Hopefully, these are small steps that help us reach out and be more inclusive.   

Finally, most work in the Society is now focused on the joint ESHS/HSS meeting, co-hosted by the BSHS in Edinburgh this coming July, which promises to be one for the ages. As already reported by the program chairs and local organizers, when the submission portal closed on December 1, there were substantially more submissions than the highest number ever of ESHS and HSS attendees at any meeting combined. This is fantastic news, but also brings new challenges for the local organizers, the program chairs, and the Executive Office that work diligently to meet the moment on a very condensed timeline. We thank them all in advance and cheer them on.

There will be more things to report in the next newsletter. 

Thank you for supporting HSS.

Soraya de Chadarevian

Member News

Hans J. Haubold and Arak M. Mathai have published an article titled “Pictorial and Documentary Guide for Research, Teaching, and Education through Astronomy, Physics, and Mathematics Pursued under the Umbrella of the United Nations (1974-2024).” (Creative Education 16, 964-992. doi: 10.4236/ce.2025.167061). This paper was prepared for an Open-Access-only publication as a guide reporting on Education (all aspects of space science and technology), Teaching (remote sensing and GIS, satellite meteorology and global climate, satellite communication, space and atmospheric sciences, global navigation satellite systems), and Research (solar neutrino problem, formation of structure in the Universe) in astronomy (solar physics, cosmology), physics (nuclear physics, neutrino physics), and mathematics (fractional calculus, special functions of mathematical physics) exercised over a period of 50 years (1974-2024). In this period, more than twenty workshops were held and seven regional centres for space science and technology education were established over all regions of the world: Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Western Asia, and Europe. This effort was undertaken in cooperation of ESA, NASA, JAXA, and 193 member states of the United Nations under the auspices of the UN, also supported by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The paper provides access to most of the documents in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), proceedings, and published papers and books focusing on education, teaching, and research.

 Amanda Peruchi has published a new research article: “"A substitute for quinine? Early medical pharmaceutical studies on pereirine in nineteenth-century Brazil," Pharmaceutical Historian 55, no. 3 (2025): 65-73.

Judith V. Grabiner has published an article, "Mathematics and Geometry," in Jorge Secada, Travis Tanner, Cecilia Wee, eds., The Cartesian Mind, Routledge, September, 2025. (ISBN 9781138847422). The book contains over forty papers on the history, nature, and influence of Descartes' philosophy. Professor Grabiner’s article aims to explain to a philosophical audience what the statement "Descartes invented analytic geometry" actually entails.

Gabrielle Birchak, member of HSS, is pleased to announce the seventh season of her podcast “Math! Science! History!”. The podcast uncovers history’s hidden stories of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs, weaving together research, sound design, and narrative to make the history of scientific discovery come alive. The new season will continue to examine the history of mathematics and science through overlooked figures, cultural contexts, and new interviews with scholars and practitioners. More information is available at www.MathScienceHistory.com

HSS Council member, Prakash Kumar has published his new book, A History of India's Green Revolution: Reign of Technocracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Joyce Chaplin has published a new book: "The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Polly Winsor was awarded the David Hull Prize by the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology in Porto, Portugal, July 2025.

Susana Gómez has published the volume Patrizi y la filosofía natural de los espíritus (Patrizi and the Natural Philosophy of Spirits), (Seville:, Thémata, 2025). The aim of this book is to offer an intellectual biography of Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597) that, while maintaining historical rigor, remains accessible and engaging to the non-specialist reader. In doing so, it seeks to rescue him from oblivion and restore him to the place he should always have occupied in the histories of the origins of modern science, alongside his contemporaries Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Bernardino Telesio, and Gerolamo Cardano.

HSS member Fiona Williamson has just published her latest book Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Focussing on the 1870s to the 1950s, it looks at how weather knowledge and the practitioners of weather knowledge changed and how the tropical environment went from being feared to (possibly) being managed.

Richard Yeo’s book Defining Science:  William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993; paperback, 2003) has been translated into Chinese and published at the end of 2024 by Central Compilation and Translation Press ( 中央编译出版社) in conjunction with Cambridge University Press for sale in China.

George Steinmetz has won the 2024 Career Achievement Award, American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology. 

Frank W. Stahnisch (AMF/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) has been elected to join the class of Fellows (Academy of the Arts and Humanities) of the Royal Society of Canada (September 9th, 2025). He recently published a new monograph, entitled Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989 with McGill-Queen's University Press in Montreal, PQ and Kingston, ON, 2025 (https://www.mqup.ca/great-minds-in-despair-products-9780228024590.php). He also received a Sandra L. Panther Fellowship in the History of Family Medicine from The Center for the History of Family Medicine of the American Academy of Family Physicians in Leawood, KS, which supports a new research project directed at the Quest for Holism and Integration in Medicine during his research and scholarship leave period from the University of Calgary (https://www.aafpfoundation.org/who-we-are/foundation-news/news-releases/2025-recipient-history-of-wellness-in-family-medicine.html).

Paola Bertucci (Yale University) was awarded the 2025 Paul Bunge Prize for best book in the history of scientific instruments for In the Land of Marvels: Science, Industrial Espionage, and Fabricated Realities in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023).

Wiki Education

How do faculty describe their Wikipedia assignments? We asked them! Watch 1 minute video

Next semester, take your students beyond the classroom to make a real-world impact with their work – incorporate the Wikipedia assignment into your courses!

What’s a Wikipedia assignment? It's a motivating, hands-on project with public impact that enhances skills in digital media literacy, research, collaboration, and fact-based writing. Your students will write for the world, not just you – and improve the world’s go-to source of independent, open-access information. 

What kind of support do faculty receive? Nonprofit Wiki Education provides postsecondary instructors in the U.S. and Canada with tailored assignment plans for their courses, including student trainings, exercises, digital tools that automatically track student work, and our staff support – all free of charge.

Learn more and apply by December 1, 2025 for your spring term courses at teach.wikiedu.org.

Questions? Reach out to andres@wikiedu.org – we’re here to help!

Donate to the New HSS Dissertation Research Travel Grant

Please consider donating to the new HSS Dissertation Research Travel Grant.

We are deeply grateful for the overwhelming support we have received from the HSS community. As graduate students, we are often dependent on external funding opportunities to support our growth as scholars. Over 40 members of HSS have donated towards the $10,000 match pledged by Dr. Sally Gregory Kholstedt, and we have already raised nearly half of our goal. 

I want to share a little bit about why this funding is so meaningful to me and every graduate student who is a part of HSS.

External funding has been key to my dissertation’s development. As a historian of health and gender, I draw on primary sources across a variety of archives and research centers. My home program’s funding structure relies on graduate TA-ships, thus necessitating international travel in the summer. Travel grants, such as the new HSS Dissertation Research Travel Grant, have given me the opportunity to work at well-known and accessible research institutions as well as small, far-flung municipal archives in Spain. In following the archival trail(s), I realized that secular lawsuits are an essential set of sources for my dissertation project. Further, the time in-person has allowed me to develop connections with the archival staff, who helped me locate related primary sources that I otherwise would not have encountered in the finding aids, etc. I look forward to paying this generosity forward someday; for now, I am grateful for those who are able to support this campaign.

Every dollar matters, so please consider donating today to help us reach our final goal. Even a donation as small as $7 from each HSS member would help us achieve the full match.

Thank you for helping us in our research!

Sincerely,

MaryKate Wolken

GECC Co-Chair

Fun Things to Do in New Orleans

New Orleans offers plenty of unique opportunities for food, bars and entertainment. Below are a selection of places that are worth checking out while you are in the city. 

Food: 

Parkway Bakery and Tavern: In 1929, the "poor boy" is said to have been created by Bennie and Clovis Martin when the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees, Division 194, went on strike. The Martin brothers gave striking workers the sandwiches for free. Although the Martin brothers’ restaurants are no longer around, you can still try a piece of New Orleans history at Parkway Bakery and Tavern, which has been in business since 1911 and has been serving Po Boys since their creation in 1929.

https://parkwaypoorboys.com/

538 Hagan Ave, New Orleans, LA 70119

Café Du Monde: You don’t need to fly to France to try fresh Beignets and Café au Lait. Head over to Market Street and check out Café Du Monde. This famous open-air cafe has been serving New Orleans since 1862, and is open 24/7. 

https://shop.cafedumonde.com/history/

800 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA 70116

Loretta's Pralines: Brought to Louisiana by French settlers, pralines have become a staple in New Orleans. Since their introduction to the American South, pralines have taken on their own unique American form, replacing almonds with pecans and adding cream. Loretta’s holds the distinction of being the first successful praline shop in New Orleans to be owned and operated by an African American woman.

https://lorettaspralines.com/

2101 N Rampart St, New Orleans, LA 70116

Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar: If you are looking for authentic New Orleans cuisine, Felix’s is the place to go. Their menu offers a wide range of traditional New Orleans dishes, including Jambalaya, Oysters, Shrimp and Grits, Po Boys, and Gumbo. You can make a reservation, but walk-ins are also accepted.

https://felixs.com/about/

739 Iberville St. New Orleans, LA 70130

Bars and Jazz Clubs: New Orleans is known for its many bars and jazz clubs. There are no open container laws, which means you are allowed to take alcohol out of bars. If you are traveling from outside the U.S. and do not have a U.S. driver’s license, you will need your passport. 

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar: Built between 1722 and 1732 by Nicolas Touze, this bar is reputed to be the oldest structure used as a bar in the United States. The structure survived two fires at the turn of the 19th Century. Between 1772 and 1791, the property is believed to have been used by the Lafitte Brothers, Jean and Pierre, as a New Orleans base for their Barataria smuggling operation. Although these stories are likely a mixture of fiction and truth, this unique and historic bar is still a great place to grab a drink.

https://www.lafittesblacksmithshop.com/AboutUs.html

941 Bourbon St, New Orleans, LA 70116

Pat O’Brien’s: Pat O’Brien ran a speakeasy during the Prohibition days. Once alcohol became legal in 1933, he and an old friend opened the bar at its current location. This bar is where the Hurricane cocktail was invented. They also have a lounge where you can watch a dueling pianos show. Although it is fairly touristy, there is a large courtyard, which is perfect if you are with a bigger group. 

https://patobriens.com/

718 St Peter, New Orleans, LA 70116

Spotted Cat Music Club: A more traditional and intimate jazz club with limited seating, the Spotted Cat Music Club is a great place to listen to jazz music. While visiting, you can stop by the Frenchmen Street Art Bazaar, which is right next to the club. Just be aware that this club often charges a cover fee and has a one-drink minimum rule to listen to the bands.

https://www.spottedcatmusicclub.com/

623 Frenchmen St, New Orleans, LA 70117

Bacchanal Fine Wine & Spirits: If you prefer wine or want a more lowkey environment, Bacchanal is a nice escape from the busy areas of the French Quarter. They have a nice outdoor space where you can drink wine and relax with friends. It is a bit off the beaten path, about 35 minutes from the Sheraton using transit and closer to an hour if you are walking.

https://www.bacchanalwine.com/

600 Poland Avenue, New Orleans, LA

Fun Activities: 

The WWII Museum: The National WWII Museum tells the story of the American experience during the war. Featuring interactive exhibits, the museum has four main galleries, the Road to Tokyo: Pacific Theater Galleries, where you can learn about the Pacific Theater; the Road to Berlin: European Theater Galleries, and the Campaigns of Courage Pavilion where you can explore the European Theater, and the Liberation Pavilion where you can learn about the Holocaust, and the lasting impacts of the war. 

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/

945 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130

Jazz Museum: Housed in the historic Old U.S. Mint, you can explore the mint on the ground floor before visiting the second-floor exhibit to explore the origins of jazz and learn how the music genre has shaped New Orleans. 

https://nolajazzmuseum.org/

400 Esplanade Ave, New Orleans, LA 70116

Sazerac House: The Sazerac House is an opportunity to learn about the history of Cognac, coffee houses, bars, and the Sazerac cocktail while sampling a selection of drinks. They offer free self-guided tours of the distillery and also offer paid tasting tours where you can taste cocktails while a guide provides an in-depth look into the history of the company and its role in shaping New Orleans.

https://www.sazerachouse.com/visit/

101 Magazine St, New Orleans, LA 70130

Jackson Square: Originally named the Plaza de Armas before being renamed to honor Andrew Jackson’s pivotal role in the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson Square is located in the heart of the French Quarter. The square served as the site where Louisiana was officially designated as a U.S. territory following the Louisiana Purchase and is now designated as a National Historic Landmark. The square is also home to the St. Louis Cathedral, which opened in 1794 and offers guided tours starting at $49.

Tourist information: https://www.neworleans.com/listing/jackson-square/32150/

History: https://www.nps.gov/places/places-darmes.htm

Jackson Square, New Orleans, LA 70116.

Membership renewal season is upon us! History of Science Society membership runs on the calendar year, so it’s time to prepare for the new year.

When you’re ready to renew for 2026, visit hssonline.org and log in with your username and password. If you’ve forgotten your password, you can request a reset email on the login page. As you might remember, Council voted to revise our member dues structure in November 2023, and the new structure is as follows, with income based in US dollars:

If your income or circumstances have changed since last year, you can select a new tier during the renewal process. There’s also a new question in your member profile to consider. Under Additional Information is a space to note your interest in being a Mentor or Mentee. There are multiple options to choose from, so take a look and select the option to note your interest. You can always change your selection in your profile.

When you’re ready to renew for 2026, log in to your Member Profile at https://hssonline.org/login.aspx and select Renew Now. Select the appropriate dues tier. After checkout, you’re ready for another year of HSS membership! 

Have you graduated or retired? Congratulations! If your member type (Student, Individual, Retired) has changed, please email me directly at morgan@hssonline.org, so this change can be applied to your profile. If any questions arise during renewal, these can be directed to me as well.

Your membership supports HSS annual meetings, all of our publications, and the community at large. Thank you for being a part of HSS.

Morgan Valenzuela

Manager of Member Services

New Orleans Note

Greetings from New Orleans! With the heat finally breaking, the weather should be delightful by the time HSS attendees arrive in November. Whether it’s your first time in the city or your tenth, there’s always a lot to do. Here are a few recommendations from a recent transplant:

First, eat well! The conference hotel is surrounded by wonderful local restaurants, including classics like Mother’s (lower $) or newer gems like Compère Lapin and GW Fins (higher $$). Two of the best cocktail bars in America, according to some recent “Best Of” lists, Jewel of the South and Tatlo, are also only a short walk. 

Everyone here will tell you that to really appreciate the city, you need to escape downtown and Bourbon Street. Get a po-boy at Guy’s, Domilise’s, or Liuzza’s by the Track. Order 100 pieces of chicken or catfish at McHardy’s Chicken and Fixin or get a combo at Li’l Dizzy’s. Visit the Bywater and try Elizabeth’s, Bywater Bakery (maybe splurge for Acamaya), and end with wine, cheese, and music at Bacchanal. In Uptown, there are local boutiques along Magazine St., as well as great brunch at Molly’s Rise and Shine. My favorite ice cream is Lucy Boone, which isn’t far from the fun communal dining experience at Mosquito Supper Club. If you’re vegan or vegetarian, restaurants can be a little tricky, but you might consider Sukho Thai (multiple locations), Aroma (same story), Sneaky Pickle (Bywater), The Daily Beet, or Bearcat (Downtown/Business District). New Orleans relies heavily on tourism, which has declined slightly, so you should in fact feel obligated to eat delicious food as often as possible.

Second, hear some music. Preservation Hall, the most storied venue in the city, has traditional shows multiple times a day just about every day. It’s also only a quick jaunt from the hotel; reserving front row seats is worth it for your first visit. Farther afield, on Frenchman Street, Snug Harbor has excellent jazz for those who want to sit down and the Spotted Cat, across the street, tends a little livelier. Just about anywhere you go will take you somewhere else great: the Jazz & Blues Market brings in more famous names and has a new sound system; Bayou Bar at the Pontchartrain Hotel is nice; and Vaughan's Lounge in Bywater has a more relaxed vibe.

If you can’t make a show, you can always tune in to WWOZ in the car or on your laptop and listen to some of the best of New Orleans music. WWOZ also lists most live shows happening in town and tracks the city’s parades, including the Women of Class Second Line, which takes place on Sunday afternoon of the conference.

A few more miscellaneous suggestions: City Park is a wonderful place to walk or run, especially the Sculpture Garden of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Swamp tours (through Delta Discovery, if you can) are fascinating. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, closer to the conference, is great. It’s also not really a trip to New Orleans if you don’t treat yourself to beignets at least once.

And finally, for those who are interested in giving more back to the city during your visit, I’m organizing a small group to plant trees on Saturday morning with SOUL (Sustaining Our Urban Landscape). New Orleans has lost nearly 30% of its tree canopy since Hurricane Katrina, which has increased the danger of extreme heat, and programs to restore those trees are grappling with funding shortfalls. Send me an email at bbolman@tulane.edu if you’re interested in participating! And feel free to reach out with other questions, too.

Announcing the Inaugural Joseph Needham Foundation Awards

Are you conducting groundbreaking research on science in Asia? We invite submissions for two major opportunities supporting emerging scholars in the history of science. The Joseph Needham Foundation Awards, administered by the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, recognize outstanding work in the global and transregional history of science centered on Asia.

Two awards will be given:

• A Research Grant of $3,000 for graduate students and early-career scholars (including independent scholars and those in temporary positions within three years of the PhD). Proposals should include a one-page CV and a project description (max 1,000 words) outlining goals, contributions, timeline, and plans for use of funds.
• An Essay Prize of $500 for original, unpublished essays under 12,000 words. Essays must be in English, anonymized for blind review, and conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.
  

Both awards include a certificate and will be presented at the History of Science Society’s annual meeting. Applications are due December 1, 2025, and should be submitted as a single PDF to needhamfhsasia@gmail.com. HSS membership is not required at the time of application, though awardees must be members during the year their award is active.

We are deeply grateful to the Joseph Needham Foundation for Science and Civilisation for its generous support. The Foundation has played a vital role in advancing scholarship on the global history of science. Joseph Needham’s visionary contributions—particularly his decades-long engagement with the sciences of China—have long shaped our understanding of science as a deeply plural, intercultural, and historically entangled enterprise. By supporting new generations of scholars, the Needham Foundation continues to expand the boundaries of the field and affirms the importance of research that knits Asian sciences into global conversations.

Member News

Karine Chemla announces the publication of her co-edited volume: Agathe Keller and Karine Chemla, (eds.) Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World. Textual Criticism, Critical Editions and Translations of Scholarly Texts in History by Springer Nature (2024).

Should you wish to write a review of this book, please directly contact Christopher Wilby from Springer (Chris.Wilby@springer.com).

Andreas Daum, professor at SUNY Buffalo, received the Senior Award for Excellence in International Exchange by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Alumni Association US in April 2025.

Axel Jansen (GHI Washington) has shared a CFP for a conference on “The Moralization of Science,” scheduled to take place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna, Austria) in September 2026. Deadline for proposals is September 15, 2025. Find details here.

Patrick McCray’s new book, A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines, will be published by MIT Press in November 2025.

Vivette García-Deister has been featured on Platypus, the blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing of the American Anthropological Association, speaking about her work as the editor-in-chief of the journal Tapuya. 

Read or listen to “STS Academic Publishing As a Work of Service and Hope: A Conversation with Vivette García-Deister.”

Pamela O. Long's most recent book is Technology in Mediterranean and European Worlds, 600-1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025). She was awarded the Art Molella Distinguished Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (June 2025-March 2026).

Laura Meneghello (University of Siegen) has guest-edited the issue of the journal Global Environment vol. 18, no. 1 (2025) on “Visions of Sustainability.” The aim of this interdisciplinary issue is to historicize narratives of sustainability from different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, analyzing the plurality of meanings with which sustainability was invested by historical actors and how these changed over time. It gathers specific case studies displaying different perspectives on discourses of sustainability and their social and cultural construction, negotiation and contestation on the global, national and local levels. While analysing discourses of sustainability, the contributions pay special attention to their temporal dimension, as well as to their entanglement with political and economic matters, scientific knowledge and moral values. The special issue is fully Open Access.

The Making and Knowing Project, led by Pamela Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University, has recently released an open source and customizable publishing tool, EditionCrafter, which allows users to publish digital editions as feature-rich and sustainable static sites, based on the feature set and infrastructure of Secrets of Craft and Nature, the Making and Knowing Project's Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640. In January, the Project also released an open-access Research and Teaching Companion for instructors and students wishing to integrate hands-on lessons into teaching and learning.

Seth Rasmussen is the 2025 recipient of the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry, awarded by the History of Chemistry (HIST) division of the American Chemical Society. More information on the award can be found here.

His newest history book has just been published by Oxford University Press: The Origins and Early History of Conjugated Organic Polymers: Organic Semiconductors, Synthetic Metals, and the Prehistory of Organic Electronics.

Bonnie Mak (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Information History with Toni Weller, Alistair Black, and Laura Skouvig. The 37-chapter volume explores the cultural history of information practices, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Available in early July 2025.

Three books edited by Raffaele Pisano have been published this year (2025) by Springer:

An Intellectual History of Science in the Renaissance. Part I: Cultural & Fundamental Frameworks. 

An Intellectual History of Science in the Renaissance. Part II: Cultural, Fundamental & Technological Frameworks. 

Nanoscience & Nanotechnologies: Critical Problems, Science in Society, Historical Perspectives. 

Current Scientist Biography

Joel Cohen has published biographies for a recent plant botanist and conservation scientist occurred as a follow-up to his presentation at the 2023 annual conference of the Crop Science Society of America. A full-length copy of the final biography (titled “A Life Interrupted: The Story of Botanist Calvin Sperling from Minnesota to Biodiversity”) was published in Crop Breeding, Genetics and Genomics, while a different and abbreviated version was invited by the Science History Institute, and published as “Calvin Ross Sperling,” in their “Scientific Biographies” division.

These papers examine the life and work of Dr. Calvin R. Sperling (1957–1995), beginning with his family farm and culminating in his becoming a trusted source on biodiversity conservation and directing plant exploration for the US Department of Agriculture. In addition to biographical material, the papers trace changing understandings of germplasm and genetic resources with Dr. Sperling’s insights from ethnobotanical studies with Richard Schultes becoming timelier. These changes focused Dr, Sperling’s career on combatting genetic erosion, ensuring the conservation of crop relatives, and expanding his communication abilities. 

Michael R. Dove (Yale University) announces the publication in 2024 of his book Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History, which examines the work of Georg Eberhard Rumphius (seventeenth century), Carl Linnaeus (eighteenth century), Alfred Russel Wallace (nineteenth century), and Harold C. Conklin (twentieth century), published by Yale University Press. 

Darryl E. Brock has just published a new research article titled "Dixie, Darwinism, and Democrats: Evolution and American Intellectual Epiphany" in Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2025), pp. 1-34.

Bruce Lewenstein, professor of science communication at Cornell University (in the departments of Science & Technology Studies and of Communication) is the inaugural winner of the new PCST Award for "exceptional contributions to the advancement of science communication as a professional field." The award was announced at the conference of the International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology, held in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 2025.

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) developed a survey for historians doing research during the summer (Northern Hemisphere) of 2025. OAH aims to collect information about the impact of funding cuts and other deterrents to historical research. To help OAH assess what is happening as historians access archives, libraries, and other collections (physical and digital), you can complete the survey here. 

Towards a Materialist History of Knowledge: Reflections from a Workshop

Sam Franz, Claire Votava, Brad Bolman

As humanistic disciplines reengage with critical theories of capitalism—particularly those shaped by Marx and his interpreters—can the history of science afford to remain on the sidelines? On April 4-5, 2025, we participated in a workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania that took up this challenge, convened under the theme of “materialist approaches to the history of knowledge.” Scholars from NYU, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Columbia, and more gathered from across disciplines including History, History of Science, English, and Religious Studies. We offer this reflection to highlight themes and questions that we believe are relevant to the History of Science Society as we reevaluate the political project of our discipline.

Critical social theory, especially of Marxian influence, has long been a part of the history of science. Genealogies often begin with Boris Hessen’s classic analysis of the socio-economic roots of Newton’s Principia (1931) or Franz Borkenau’s The Transition from Feudal to Modern Thought (Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild, 1934). Such texts directly influenced key figures in British history of science in the first half of the 20th century, including Joseph Needham and J. D. Bernal, among others. Austrian émigré Edgar Zilsel, whose work is foundational to debates about the role of artisanal labor in the emergence of modern science, was similarly indebted to Marxism, even while he combined the tradition with elements of logical positivism. Robert Merton’s work in the 1930s frequently cited Hessen and acknowledged a direct influence, while Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and other classical sociologists of knowledge built on the work of Hungarian Marxist historian and philosopher György Lukács. Foucault, too, justified his work in light of Marx’s political project, even while he critiqued what he saw as a problematic discourse of 19th century political economy in Marx’s work.

In an era marked by deepening wealth inequality and the unraveling of the post-war science funding regime, particularly in the United States, which underpinned much of 20th century science, it appears increasingly necessary to center critical theories of economy and society in our studies of science. 

Although scholars throughout the 20th century repeatedly turned to materialist frameworks to understand the production of knowledge, the discipline of the history of science has often distanced itself from the explicit terrain of political economy or lost sight of its own earlier engagements. While we root science in society through historical epistemology, we frequently gesture toward the social without fully theorizing its structures, contradictions, or material conditions. Our workshop on “materialist histories of knowledge” aimed to address this gap by returning to a foundational conception of materialism that centers the production and reproduction of life as essential to the historical understanding of science.

In our view, these critical perspectives can make the social and political stakes of the history of science clearly visible. Recently, work in the history of capitalism and intellectual history has been given serious attention outside of scholarly circles—here we are here thinking about the work of Adam Tooze, Quinn Slobodian, Julia Ott, Naomi Klein, and more. We see the relevance of these thinkers as evidence that, in our current moment, studies of the entanglement of science, technology, and capitalism are gaining visibility in public discourse. Recent and commendable work in the history of science has highlighted concepts from political economy, for instance the role of markets or of work in the construction of scientific knowledge. Our work focused instead on the systemic character of capitalism, especially production, management, and value. We raise a number of questions for the field: can we expand on histories of the laboratory commodity or scientific circulation to explore the structures that make that possible? Can we go beyond recognizing invisible labor to understanding the conditions of capitalist labor itself? Furthermore, might a reengagement with critical theories of capitalism replace “economic-,” “social-,” or “political-historical” frames in the history of science with a more sophisticated engagement with political economy and renew the contemporary political relevance of our work?

Scholars at the workshop approached materialist histories of science through a range of lenses, but one cluster of panels focused on historical actors—primarily scientists—who grappled explicitly with questions of labor, class, and expertise. This was not to suggest a uniform embrace of an explicitly “Hessian” framework, but rather to trace how members of the scientific community have, at various moments, attempted to make sense of the political economy of their own discipline.

One such (perhaps overt) example includes that of the “radical science movement,” or the multi-national effort, which emerged in the late 1960s, to challenge science and its more vexing sociopolitical and economic entanglements. In Britain, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS)—which drew intellectual lineage from figures such as J.D. Bernal—mounted wide-ranging critiques of the scientific establishment. These included interrogations of the relationship between science and capital, calls for the radical redistribution of knowledge, and demands for a structural reorganization of the laboratory itself. Historical cases such as BSSRS offer fertile ground for engaging with historical materialism—not as an abstract framework, but as a lived problem for those attempting to remake science from within.

Another set of panels raised methodological questions about the relative place of contingency in history and the value of knowledge production. Drawing directly on Marxian critical theory, panelists went beyond a historicist understanding of the way that material interests and social location inform scientific work. While the history of science has often centered theories of history that attempt to explain the contingency and historical choice that inform the development of knowledge, panelists asked whether questions about the role that the general social dynamics generated by capital—those that are not contingent—can be understood to play a role in the production of knowledge. In other words, should capitalism and its attendant social relations be understood as contingent? Can they be? Or does the analysis of generalized social systems (such as capitalism) require theoretical frameworks that reach beyond historicist and contingent understandings of the history of science? 

The implications of such an approach would move the history of science beyond historical epistemology. Rather than studying scientists as members of a class, or scientific objects as commodities, this approach would consider the way that labor under capitalism, as the dominant form of social mediation in our society, centrally regulates the production of scientific knowledge. Instead of “following the money,” a conceptual approach would consider, for instance, the similarities between the commodity form and European conceptions of nature. Such a perspective would maintain that the way that scientists or knowers conceive of the world is conditioned by the social forms that govern everyday practice, such as generalized notions of labor, time, the commodity, value, and so forth. The production of knowledge (especially “productive” scientific knowledge) would require explanation as part of a larger social system. This would also invite further, necessary engagement with science under actually existing communist or socialist regimes.

In general, our approach suggests that while the history of science has intermittently engaged with the histories of capitalism, labor, and work, a more sustained dialogue with critical social theory—especially materialist conceptions of history—can open new avenues of inquiry and reinvigorate the political stakes of our discipline. At the same time, we must push beyond piecemeal analyses centered on production, commodification, or circulation. Moreover, understanding capitalism and science requires attending to their operation beyond traditional sites of economic centrality. This means confronting how capitalist and scientific practices unfold not only in metropoles or laboratories, but also in so-called peripheral or marginal zones, where relations of power, extraction, and knowledge production are often most visible.

Workshop participants included:

Ibanca Anand (Johns Hopkins University)

Brad Bolman (Tulane University)

Jacob Bruggeman (Johns Hopkins University)

Angus Burgin (Johns Hopkins University)

Zoe Fallon (University of Pennsylvania)

Sam Franz (University of Pennsylvania)

Max Ehrenfreund (Kenyon College)

Zac Endter (New York University)

Sam Herrmann (University of Pennsylvania)

Jackson Herndon (New York University)

Daniel Judt (Yale University)

Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute)

Jonas Knatz (New York University)

Harun Küçük (University of Pennsylvania)

Yang Li (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Robin Manley Mihran (University of California, Berkeley)

Veronique Mickisch (New York University)

Andrew Sartori (New York University)

Gautham Shiralagi (Columbia University)

Meriç Tanik (Columbia University)

Claire Votava (University of California, Los Angeles)

Notes:

[1]: Robert M. Young, “Marxism and the History of Science,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, eds. G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, M.J.S. Hodge, and R.C. Olby, (London: Routledge, 1989), 77–86. See also Joseph Needham, “Foreword” and Gary Werskey, “Introduction,” in Science at the Cross Roads: Papers from The Second International Congress of the History of Science 1931, ed. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, (New York: Routledge, 2013), vii-xxix.

[2]: See, for instance, Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47, no. 4 (January 1942): 544–62. While Mannheim was not an avowed Marxist, his sociology of knowledge was clearly in dialogue with the tradition. See, for instance, David Kaiser, “A Mannheim for All Seasons: Bloor, Merton, and the Roots of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” Science in Context 11, no. 1 (1998): 51–87; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils; preface by Louis Wirth (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954).

[3]: See Robert M. Young, “Marxism and the History of Science,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, M. J. S. Hodge, and R. C. Olby (London: Routledge, 1989), 77–86.

[4]: Even while Foucault famously critiqued Marx, in public venues he often justified his research in terms of class struggle. See, for instance, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, ed. and foreword by John Rajchman (New York: The New Press, 2006), p. 46-7.

[5]: Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer, eds., Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories, Osiris 33 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018). See also Lissa Roberts, Seth Rockman, and Alexandra Hui, “Science and/as Work: An Introduction to This Special Issue,” History of Science 61, no. 4 (2023): 439–47.

News from CoDI

In 2025, the Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity will focus on advancing accessibility in all forms at the HSS. We invite you to join us in making this possible. Here are three tips on accessibility from the HSS Guide to Inclusivity that will improve your presentations at the annual meeting, and indeed in any context:

• Be sure to make your presentations accessible for d/Deaf and hearing-impaired people: Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint have built-in closed captioning features that transcribe the speaker’s and audience members’ words onto the screen.
• Ensure that the colors you use on your slides are friendly for the colorblind. There are online apps—for example Vischeck—that will check each slide to ensure that it is accessible. Colors on opposite sides of the color wheel work best together (red/blue, yellow/purple). Here’s a helpful accessibility color palette.
  
• If a microphone is available, please make sure to use it consistently.

Lone Star Historians of Science

Continuing a longstanding tradition, the Lone Star History of Science Group held its 38th annual meeting in Austin on 18 April 2025. This spring the group was happy to welcome as its speaker Dr. Elizabeth Bishop of the American University of Iraq–Baghdad, formerly of Texas State University in San Marcos. Dr. Bishop spoke on “‘Atoms for Peace’ in Iraq,” tracing efforts by the U. S. government in the 1950s to use access to nuclear technology to gain diplomatic leverage in the Middle East. The British nuclear establishment also made an important contribution, with staff from the UK Atomic Energy Authority helping to set up a training center in Baghdad in 1957 to conduct radioisotope research. Dr. Bishop’s talk brought out the complex role nuclear science and technology played mid-20th century international relations, particularly in the Middle East.

Each spring, the Lone Star Group brings together historians of science, technology, and medicine from around Texas to discuss their shared interests and enjoy a friendly dinner. Its constitution, adopted at an Austin restaurant in 1988, provides that there shall be “no officers, no by-laws, and no dues,” and the group remains resolutely informal. Anyone wishing to be added to the group’s mailing list (and that’s all it takes to become a member in good standing) should contact Bruce Hunt of the University of Texas at bjhunt@austin.utexas.edu.

Front row: Cliff Cunningham, Abena Osseo-Asare, Liz Petrick, Megan Raby, Scottie Buehler, Elizabeth Bishop, Jamie Sackett, Jessie Sackett

Back row: Felipe Vilo, Yohad Zacarias, Steve Bratteng, Bruce Hunt, Luis Campos, John Lisle

Not pictured: Zayna Abdel-Rahim, Karl Stephan, Pam Stephan

Meet the team is a series meant to introduce members of HSS to the workers that make the society run. The final installment will be in the next issue of the newsletter.

What’s your role at HSS and how long have you been in it?

I joined the Executive Office in July of 2021 as an Administrative Assistant. In August 2024, I became the Member Manager at HSS, though I still perform most of my administrative and meeting-related duties. Both positions have permitted me to wear many hats. I really enjoy the variety that comes with the work.

Reflecting on the centennial annual meeting, was there anything that surprised you?

Honestly, I’m still surprised that the skies didn’t open up and rain out the centennial banquet! The evening was hot and humid (it was the Yucatán after all) and excitement grew like the gathering clouds all day. But the night was beautiful! Members gathered for dinner and drinks after the Distinguished Lecture. HSS President Professor Evelynn Hammonds ushered in the next 100 years of the History of Science and the evening ended in good conversation on the grounds of the Quinta Montes Molina.

As someone who works in administration of academic societies and professional organizations, how do you think about the relationship between an organization like HSS and the academy? 

HSS is the first academic society I’ve worked for. One of the most interesting and rewarding parts of the job is hearing from members about why societies like HSS matter to them. My hope is that HSS serves as a support system, a way to build and engage in community for academics in the field. 

Compared to other professional societies or non-profits that you’ve worked in, how is HSS different?

In a former life, I was on track to pursue a career in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) world. So, while I’ve not worked for an academic society prior to HSS, I worked in a handful of museums that were non-profits. At museums, I worked on exhibit openings and, later, fundraising events. 

The work I do for HSS means I spend less time in archives or revising exhibit labels, but I now have a better understanding ofwhat it takes for institutions, organizations, or societies to support the work they do. It also means I spend more time on eventlogistics, which can be just as entertaining and gratifying. Work for the annual meeting takes up a large portion of my time and I enjoy the logistics and communications immensely. It’s amazing to see the work that program chairs, committees, caucuses, and individual members do that culminates in the annual meeting.

What are your hopes for HSS given your current role? How do you see the society growing in the future?

I’m encouraged every day by the work of our members and the ambitions of the history of science as a whole. I am delighted to be able to serve the society in my small way. The goals of internationalizing and expanding the definition of historian resonate with me. The Biennial Interdisciplinary Summer School is a program I am proud to support and I am excited by the work that our Development Coordinator, Alex, is doing to ensure graduate students are able to participate in HSS. In my current role, I’m hoping that the member experience can be improved, that we can expand membership benefits, and I look forward to supporting the members in directing the Society as it continues into its second century. 

Are there any scholars whose work you’ve been particularly interested in or inspired by as you’ve worked with them as part of HSS?

Oh no I can’t pick favorites! But I will confess that working with the scholars in HSS has resulted in many Google searches and research rabbit-holes. I’m endlessly impressed and intrigued by the work our members do, especially when reading article abstracts, book descriptions, or professional websites. Really! You’re all doing such fascinating work. My degree is in History and Gender and Women’s Studies, and my own research focused on LGBTQ experiences in the late 1800s. Whenever I hear a presentation or read that a scholar works on medical history and gender, I’m in danger of adding to my ever-growing “To Be Read” pile. 

History of Science in the Library: An Interview with Michelle DiMeo

Interview by Sam Franz

Michelle DiMeo is the Vice President of Collections and Programs and the Arnold Thackray Director of the Othmer Library at the Science History Institute. She is the author of Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Endeavour.

Can you briefly describe your career trajectory?

After completing my PhD at the University of Warwick, I took my first postdoc at Georgia Tech, where I taught Technical Communication. It was a three-year position, but not a great fit for me, so I left after the first year to pursue a career in libraries. My first library position was Director of Digital Library Initiatives at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where I worked with the Medical Heritage Library digital consortium. I realized then that I wanted to become the director of a research library, and I spent the next decade gaining more experience through jobs at the Science History Institute (then Chemical Heritage Foundation) and Hagley Museum and Library. I’ve been the Library Director at the Science History Institute since 2020 and their VP of Collections since 2022.

What was surprising and/or challenging in your journey to your current job?

When I got my PhD in 2009, I had very few mentors. In fact, several people actively discouraged me from taking a job outside of academia because it might look like I “failed” to find an academic job! I veered off the tenure track by choice, but quickly found that the job market for curators or research directors wasn’t much better. Many institutions also required an additional MLIS degree or actual work experience in a library. Thankfully, I was able to rely on experiences I had in graduate school with Warwick’s Perdita Project, where I worked to digitize 17th-century women’s manuscripts. Today, it is more typical to see “MLIS or equivalent experience” on a recruitment advertisement. I’d also like to think that the history of science as a field recognizes job diversity more than it did 15 years ago. 

How does your perspective as a library director influence how you think about the function of academic societies like HSS? 

In some ways, my perspective probably isn’t that different from that of a traditional academic member of HSS. I value the Annual Meeting as a place to present research, get feedback, and network with colleagues. Learning about current trends in research also directly impacts how I do my job, including how I allocate funds or update our collecting policy. It is also a chance to learn who might be on the job market and for me to advertise openings at my institution. 

Is there anything you would change about how HSS integrates the work of library and museum professionals into the professional society?

I think the addition of Caucuses like CALM (Collections, Archives, Libraries, and Museums) is positive. My recommendation for further integration would be to seek true career diversity in terms of representation on plenaries and in leadership positions. There have been times when an all-academic panel has been asked to speak about something like “public history” or “the future of the field,” but I find myself wanting for more perspectives because the advice given can be outdated or incorrect.

Yes, that’s right. Museums and libraries are some of the institutions that scholars think about as doing "public history." How do you view the relationship between academic work and public-facing historical work? What are the ways that you do public history in your own work? 

I do both academic and public history. I view that relationship as being similar to how a university professor writes original work for peer-review but also teaches undergraduates. For example, my academic biography of Lady Ranelagh was published with the University of Chicago Press, and then it took months of scripting and revising with the Distillations team to create a podcast episode suitable for a public audience. I think many people confuse public history with just simplifying something, but true public history takes a position in an argument, incorporates pedagogical theory, and refines based on audience research. 

What would you want graduate students who are interested in library work to know about the field?

One thing I wish I’d known is that there are many different types of career trajectories in libraries. I mean this in terms of technical expertise (cataloging, digital collections, reader services) but also types of collections (archives, oral history, rare books). These each require different skillsets, and some may require specialist schooling while others don’t. I have also found that independent research libraries value experts with advanced degrees more than university libraries, as the primary focus of the latter is serving undergraduates.

I was recently traveling for a research fellowship and I had a challenging time explaining to my father (who isn't an academic) why they would fund me to be in residence at a research library. How do you describe the value of supporting research fellows at an organization like SHI?

Hah! I can see why your father would ask that! An independent research library has a core mission to preserve historically significant collections and to provide access to them. When someone is considering donating their personal library or archival papers to a library, I have to make a pitch for how their collections will be used at my library. Potential donors love hearing that our fellows come from all over the world to create new knowledge through their use of our collections. And the outputs of those fellowships – books, articles, even videos – raise our profile, help us reach new audiences, and cultivate new donations. 

Finally, are there any fellowship opportunities that you would like to highlight for members of HSS?

Yes! All of SHI’s fellowships are run through our Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, but you don’t need to be a historian of chemistry to apply. We open our call every fall, close it in early winter, and award fellowships in spring for the following academic year. We competitively award dozens of short-term (1-4 month) and long-term (9-12 month) fellowships each year – collectively over 100 months of fellowships annually. Based on the questions in this interview, I want to highlight our Curatorial Fellowships, which are ideal for anyone seeking a career in libraries or museums. Each year a new Curatorial Fellow joins us for two years to work with our collections on a public history project. We then help these fellows land jobs at institutions like the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, and Penn Libraries. Our program is proud to have supported or launched hundreds of careers across the field. I myself am a former Beckman Center Fellow!

Note From the Executive Office July 2025

HSS conducted its second Interdisciplinary Summer School from 23-27 June 2025 at the University of Bologna. This incredible program paired 12 early career scholars with faculty for a four-day intensive workshop. 

The 12 early career participants came from across the globe to workshop a dissertation chapter, journal article, or other work in progress. These students were selected by an ad hoc committee (composed of Council members, Committee on Meetings and Program members, and early career scholars) to participate. HSS received over 80 applications to participate.

The 2025 cohort included: Miriam Borgia (University of Bologna), Ryan Carty (Michigan State University), Yulia Cherniavskaia (Rutgers University), Jason Irving (University of Kent), Azram Rahman Khan (University of Delhi), Joshua Klein (Geneva Graduate Institute), CJ Kuncheria (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Mogana Lisi (University of Turin), David Penteado (University of Sao Paolo), Tijana Rupčić (Polish Academy of Sciences), Hayley Serpa (Yale University), and Shangshang Wang (Ludwig Maximilian University).

Lead by Summer School Chair, Matthew Shindell (Smithsonian Institution), six other faculty members joined to help mentor the students including: Gisela Mateos (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis (University of Florida), Jan Surman, (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences), Soraya de Chadarevian (UCLA), Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna), and Rocio Gomez (Virginia Commonwealth University). Faculty members led workshops for each student and conducted three masterclasses on the history of science. 

Students and faculty alike enjoyed the city of Bologna, a city rich with histories of science. 

This summer school would not have been possible without the tireless effort of Monica Azzolini. Monica was key in planning and provided a robust experience for students and faculty. She was a gracious host in Bologna: she planned meals and a visit to the botanical gardens, booked the space at the university, and organized delightful meetups outside of class. 

My thanks to all the volunteers at HSS who made this program a reality. Members from the Executive Committee, Council, Committee on Meetings and Programs, Committee on Education and Engagement, and the Graduate and Early Career Caucus all donated significant hours to select the participants, design the school, and implement it. The summer school is a testament to how a member-driven society like HSS works to provide programming for its members. 

We will be planning for our third Summer School in 2027.

Distinguished Lecturer Announcement

HSS is pleased to announce that Conevery Bolton Valencius will deliver the Distinguished Lecture at the Annual Meeting in New Orleans, entitled “Boom: What History of Science Needs to Know about Shale,” Friday, 14 November, 6 pm. 

The History of Science Society’s series of Distinguished Lectures began in 1981 at the annual meeting in Los Angeles, California. Over the past 20 years this “Society Lecture” has evolved into a highlight of the annual meeting, drawing by far the largest attendance of any session. Through the generosity of Joseph H. Hazen, the renamed HSS Distinguished Lecture has been endowed.

Conevery Bolton Valencius works on the history of environments, health, and energy. She earned a Ph.D. in the History ofScience from Harvard University in 1998 and was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. She hasearned awards from the Society of American Historians and the History of Science Society. In February 2022 she was named aFellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Valencius is the author of two books: The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002, Basic Books), which won the 2003 George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, and The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (2013, University of Chicago Press).

Valencius is currently finishing a book about earthquakes and contemporary US energy which she is co-writing with sciencejournalist Anna Kuchment of the Boston Globe. Her recent projects include a history of the Cape Ann earthquakes, an articleabout the influential 1927 World War I film Wings, and descriptive panels for the newly-donated Lynch Collection artworks soon to be installed at BC’s McMullen Museum.

Along with two scientist colleagues, Valencius recently received a grant from BC’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society to study the history and impact of injection wells, a waste-disposal technology linked to induced earthquakes.

Valencius teaches fabulous BC undergrads in courses including “Powering America,” a six-credit Core course on the historyand technology of US energy systems which she co-teaches with two scientists. Her other courses include “Leeches to Lasers:Health and Medicine in the US” and “This Land is Your Land: US Environmental History.” She is co-convenor of the “Bodies and Places” grad/faculty working group in the History Department and works to support the energetic programming of the Program in Environmental Studies and the Schiller Institute.

Sarton Medalist Announcement 

HSS is pleased to announce the 2025 Sarton Medalist, Pamela Smith.

Pamela Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. Over the course of more than three decades, Smith has published three monographs and seven edited volumes, authored or co-authored over eighty articles, and served on the dissertation committees of over sixty students.

Smith has been a transformative figure in the history of science, particularly through her pioneering work on the material culture of early modern science. Her scholarship has profoundly reshaped questions of how artisanal knowledge, craft practices, and embodied skills contributed to the development of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. From Smith’s first monograph on the business of alchemy to her most recent book on practical experience and lived experience, Smith’s scholarly contributions have been read widely in the history of science and beyond. Smith’s work as a mentor to generations of graduate students has also greatly impacted contemporary research in the history of science. In particular, she has nurtured a group of scholars dedicated to the study of history of science and technology in the global early modern world. Through her guidance, scholars influenced by Smith’s work and thinking are now actively shaping discourse on the history of science and knowledge formation in early modern and modern Europe, Asia, and beyond.

Institutionally, Smith’s work has changed the field through her leadership in founding the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. She has pioneered perhaps one of the largest collaborative humanities projects in recent memory, the Making and Knowing Project. These serve as key examples of how Smith has expanded the practice of doing the history of science in impressive and lasting ways. The Making and Knowing project has over 400 collaborators. To produce this panoramic, multi-faceted project, Smith brought together a vast international and interdisciplinary community of scholars, curators, archivists, artists, and programmers. The innovative website of the project required an immense amount of labor behind the scenes, from creating sustainable software platforms, to figuring out how to serve both research communities and the public, to developing pedagogical tools that could and have been widely deployed. It has also produced immensely impactful scholarship, including Smith's prize-winning From Lived Experience to the Written Word, which received the George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. This project has had incredible international influence. The Netherlands counts three large universities that have placed hands-on history and material engagement at the core of their research and teaching programs in Art History and Conservation: The University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and the University of Groningen. All three have been influenced by Smith’s work.

Smith’s collaborative approach to the history of science and her generosity towards junior scholars make her highly deserving of the Sarton Medal and provide a model of lasting impact in our field.

Member News

Steffen Ducheyne (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) has just published a new monograph, entitled Physics in Minerva’s Academy: Early to Mid-Eighteenth-Century Appropriations of Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy at the University of Leiden and in the Dutch Republic at Large, 1687–c.1750. It appeared as volume 37 in the Brill series Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions. As a Gold Open Access work, the book is freely available in PDF form through the above hyperlink.

The Colby College Department of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) honors a graduating senior’s academic and intellectual achievements in the major with the annual Scholar’s Award. As of 2025 it will be known as the “James R. Fleming STS Scholars Award,” in honor of the founding director of STS at Colby.

Andrew Fiss and E.A. Hunter co-authored a review of the edited volume Anachronisms in the History of Mathematics: Essays on the Historical Interpretation of Mathematical Texts (ed. Niccolò Guicciardini, Cambridge University Press, 2021). The review has been published in the journal The Mathematical Intelligencer in March 2025. 

Meet the Team- Alex Spiecker

Meet the team is a series meant to introduce members of HSS to the workers that make the society run. For the next three issues, we will publish short interviews with HSS team members.

What’s your role at HSS and how long have you been in it?

I am the Development Coordinator. My primary duties are fundraising to support HSS services and activities. I have been in this role with HSS for a year. Most of my time is spent researching and applying for grants, writing fundraising appeals, administering the NSF travel grant and looking for new sources of funds for HSS. I assist JP and Morgan with planning the Annual Meeting and coordinating other society programs and services.

Reflecting on the centennial annual meeting, was there anything that surprised you?

I was surprised to see how much fun people were having. Professional conferences that I have attended in the past were always awkward events with people gathering in the corners and talking to no one. The community at HSS feels very different compared to those events. Everyone is friendly, ready to meet new people, and have a good time even while they present work and engage in serious scholarly conversation. I was happy to see how connected everyone at HSS is within the community. 

As someone who works in administration of academic societies and professional organizations, how do you think about the relationship between an organization like HSS and the academy? Compared to other professional societies or non-profits that you’ve worked in, how is HSS different?

We are interconnected in our goals to help scholars grow in all aspects of their work. From my perspective, HSS fills in a gap by providing extracurricular services and activities that other institutions do not provide for scholars. We serve an important role in bringing together scholars from around the world from diverse institutions including universities, museums, libraries as well as independent researchers. 

I previously worked for a mental health nonprofit. I think that the main difference at HSS is that I interact with our members/constituents much more often. When you get to interact with the people you serve you are able to be a more effective fundraiser. At HSS I get to regularly see the impact of our services, whereas at my previous position I rarely had the opportunity to see the impact firsthand.

What are your hopes for HSS given your current role? How do you see the society growing in the future?

It is clear to me that HSS is really important for the community of scholars that we serve, and I hope that we can ensure HSS is there for future generations of scholars to benefit and enjoy. Through our fundraising work we can continue to expand our services for all of our members while keeping the organization financially sustainable. 

I also look forward to seeing the continued growth of culture in our community. Helping others and giving back to the community is essential to our work at HSS. When people who benefitted from our services in the past give back through volunteering, serving in elected positions and donating they help make sure we can provide those same services to future generations of scholars. 

Are there any scholars whose work you’ve been particularly interested in or inspired by as you’ve worked with them as part of HSS?

I have had the privilege of interacting with many amazing scholars throughout my first year at HSS. There is so much interesting work out there that it is hard to pick out one that is more inspiring or interesting than others. I will say that our current president Evelynn Hammonds is always inspiring to have a conversation with. Beyond her individual research, she always seems to be taking on more responsibility to help give back to the community. 

I have also had some really fun conversations with our current Secretary, Matt Shindell. As a museum curator, Matt has a different perspective on the field. Museum and library employees serve such an essential role in communicating research to the public. It is really cool to hear from scholars who have experiences that are outside of the “traditional” university career path.

HSS Vice-President Nominations

Included below are the nominations for Vice-President for the History of Science Society. Further information can be found on the HSS Website. Anyone who is an active HSS member is eligible to vote. Polls will be open 29 April 2025 and close 13 May 2025 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time.

Jacob Hamblin

Candidate Statement

I attended my first HSS meeting as a Master’s student, in La Jolla in 1997. I remember the dizzying range of topics on the program, the contentious discussions at panels, and being intimidated to meet the historians who produced work on the pages of Isis. Since that time, the field has changed in many positive ways—embracing diverse job paths, supporting early career scholars, and experimenting with hybrid methods of attendance, as we adapt to changing times. I have devoted nearly three decades to the field of History of Science. I have mentored graduate students of my own, published essays and book reviews in Isis and elsewhere, and written several books on the history of science.

My attitude toward our society today is that our members want to “double-down” on our commitment to quality public information and commentary about science, its history, and its relationship to social issues. This might require exploring new avenues of public engagement among scholars, teachers, and publishers. I take a “big tent” approach to our field, and I would encourage projects that link our work to other subfields and trends
of historical inquiry. I applaud past presidents’ work on this. One area I would like to see develop even further, and more explicitly, is our society’s engagement with public history—this would be my focus when interacting with potential sponsors, donors, and other organizations. Other issues I care about: conference travel support for graduate students; committing to wide representation of voices in our field; and strengthening HSS’s digital presence as the world’s hub for all things related to the history of science.

Current position: Professor of History, Oregon State University, USA

Current Position

Professor of History, Oregon State University 

HSS and Related Activities

HSS Council (2018-2020)

Philip J. Pauly Prize Commitee 2018-2020, chair 2019) 

Isis Editorial Board (2009-2011) 

Publications

1. Oceanographers and the Cold War (2005)

2. Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (2008)

3. Arming Mother Nature: the Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2013)

4. The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (2021)

Gwen Kay

Candidate Statement

As the History of Science Society moves into its second century, we need to ensure our relevancy, and we need to maintain our global perspective. With globally fraught politics, restricted travel access, and higher education under attack, we must work with each other, and allies, to preserve our academic freedom, and make our intellectual space as inclusive as possible.

As VP, I would work with you, the members, to enhance our meetings and programs so that they take place in settings that are fiscally, environmentally, and socially sustainable. Our members enjoy attending our annual meetings, yet travel and funding challenges are often a barrier to attendance.

As VP, I would work to engage independent scholars, members of CALM, early career and graduate students, and academics in large and small academic institutions, so that everyone feels like HSS truly is their home, and their community. For HSS to serve everyone, we must recognize that one size does not fit all.

In my years as treasurer, I have developed a reputation for being consistently present and effective. I will continue this leadership style and bring intentionality to the role of vice president.

Current Position

Professor, History; Director, Honors Program SUNY Oswego

Related Positions

Vice President, President, SUNY University Faculty Senates (2014-2017; 2017-21)

HSS and Related Activities

HSS: Treasurer, 2017-24; Women's Caucus Co-chair, 2006-08; Rossiter Prize Committee
HSS Forum for the History of Science in America 2002-5, 2008-10, 2011-15
AAHM Finance Committee 2020-22, Education and Outreach Committee, 2007-8 

Suman Seth 

Candidate Statement

Thanks for considering my nomination. I completed an honours degree in Physics (co-supervised by the HPS department) at the University of Sydney in 1995. Moving to the US for my PhD, I turned to the history of modern physics, publishing my first monograph in 2010. Since then, I have moved towards the history of medicine, from a history of science perspective, exploring histories of ‘race-medicine’ in the 18th and 19th C British empires. I’ve also published in postcolonial science studies. I’ve served in multiple roles within HSS, including co-editor of Osiris, HSS council member, and editorial board member for both Osiris and Isis. I currently chair the Respectful Behavior Review Committee. In terms of a formal platform, I should emphasise my intellectual, social, and political commitments. Intellectually, I am dedicated to a history of science that borrows enthusiastically from and contributes just as enthusiastically to multiple fields. At the same time, I think we should hold tight to our core sensibilities and resist pressures to become merely another branch of cultural history or STS. Socially, the US history of science community is more diverse than when I first attended meetings in the late-90s, but considerably more remains to be done to make our conferences and programming as welcoming and supportive as they can be. Finally, this is a deeply difficult political moment and it is not one where pretenses to academic objectivity—of the kind our fields have thoroughly debunked—will continue to work in our or broader interests. Without becoming a political organization, it seems to me that HSS could be doing more to support colleagues struggling both locally and globally, and I would work to find ways to facilitate that support.

Current Position

Professor and Chair, Cornell STS Department 

Related Positions

2021-2027: Chair, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University 

HSS and Related Activities

2025: Chair, HSS Respectful Behavior Review Committee
2021-23: Price-Webster Committee (Best Article published in Isis)
2016-2021: Co-Editor (with W. Patrick McCray), Osiris
2018-2020: Advisory Council, History of Science Society.
Editorial Board, Osiris
Editorial Board, Isis

Publications

1. 2018: Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press).

2. 2010: Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT)

3. 2021: "The Descent of Darwin" (Ed., with Erika Milam), BJHS Themes.

4. 2014: "Re-Locating Race" (Ed.), FOCUS Section, Isis 105: 759-814

5. 2009: "Science, Colonialism, Postcolonialism" (Ed.), Special Issue of Postcolonial Studies 12(4) (December)

6. 2024: ‘A Decided Inaptitude in his Constitution’: Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire.” Osiris 39 (2024): 95-113.

7. 2024: and Itty Abraham, “Postcolonial STS” in Ulrike Felt and Alan Irwin (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies (Edward Elgar)

8. 2021: “’Constitutions Selection’: Darwin, Race, and Medicine,” BJHS Themes 6: 25-43.

9. 2009: “Putting Knowledge in its Place: Science, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial,” Postcolonial Studies 12(4): pp. 373-88.

10. 2004: “Quantum Theory and the Electromagnetic World-View, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 35 (1): pp. 67-93.

Interview by Sam Franz

Can you briefly describe your career and your involvement in HSS over the years?

When I started as a graduate student in the History of Science program at the University of Wisconsin, the History of Science Society was foreign to me. I remember attending a very cold conference one November when the annual meeting came to Madison, and I gave a paper in Minneapolis a few years later, but I was not a member of the Society until I started working in the Isis office. I think of my experience when I talk with our graduate students here at the University of Oklahoma because I want them to recognize the extraordinary benefits one gets from being connected to the Society early in their career. The community that HSS creates can be crucial to advancing as a scholar in the field.

In the last year or two of my graduate studies while I was living in Ithaca, New York, Margaret Rossiter, then Isis editor, hired me as a temporary managing editor. In that capacity I helped to shepherd a couple issues each of Isis and Osiris to publication, as well as the 75th special anniversary issue, Catching Up with the Vision. While I was working in the office, the position of Society Bibliographer was advertised and Margaret encouraged me to apply for the position. 

When one says "bibliography" they usually mean the thing that goes at the end of a paper or a book. What is the Isis bibliography, and how is it different from the former? What is IsisCB?

When I was appointed as the History of Science Society bibliographer in 2002, it was clear that I was going to have to find my way around the discipline in ways I never had been required before. Being in charge of the Isis Current Bibliography (IsisCB, for short) meant that I had to become familiar with the whole field, not just my corner of it. I needed to learn about the journals and presses that published the history of science, and not just in the US or Britain, but also around the world. That big picture overview has been crucial to how I think about the discipline and how I have tried to shape the bibliography project. In essence, I’ve come to see the CB as more than simply a list of citations. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I view the bibliography as a kind of map for navigation, both as regards the content as well as the social structure of our field.

What I mean by that is that it contains as much information about the people and institutions that make history of science possible as it does about the content of the scholarship produced. With a journal article or book citation, for instance, we know about the authors and editors who have worked on a specific topic, and we know the publisher. Citations of doctoral dissertations tell us even more useful things, like the school where the author studied and that person’s advisor. When you think about it this way, the bibliography can be understood as a social network. 

Over the years, I’ve sought to capture the information in that network and use it to help scholars. I’m always looking for ways to exploit that material to strengthen the search platform. On the one hand, I strive to make straightforward bibliographic search better. After all, this is the most common reason people turn to the CB. If you have a research project, especially if it is a new area for you, you go directly to the bibliography to find sources. Researchers, teachers, and students are the key user base for this kind of search, and I want to ensure that the CB allows them to get started on new projects and keep up with current ones efficiently. 

On the other hand, there are other uses for the bibliography. I know a number of journal editors who find it useful for their work. They turn to the CB to find scholars whom they can ask to peer review a manuscript or authors who might review a book for them. In other words, they are looking for people. In a similar vein, I am the current chair of my department at the University of Oklahoma and I find the CB invaluable when I need to find names of scholars to review tenure and promotion dossiers for faculty. Finally, the data we have can tell you a lot about publishers themselves. If you are an author trying to find a venue for publishing your work—a journal where you might submit your article or a publisher that might have an interest in your book manuscript—the CB could be one service that is helpful to you. These efforts are subtly but significantly different than looking up citations for a research project. 

The point is that one needs to see the bibliography as more than just a citation list. Once you do that, a world of interesting possibilities opens up for you.

Do all disciplines have bibliographies?

No, and I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that we do have one.

My thinking about the bibliography has been especially influenced by the way that I understand how the CB came to be. The field was in large part defined by the work of George Sarton, and he included his first bibliography in the first issue of his new journal Isis in 1913—the CB was part of his effort to establish a coherent discipline of study. I consider that to be an extremely important part of our history. Zack Barr, Alex Ratowt, and I explore this in our recent article in the 100th anniversary issue of the journal that came out last year. That origin story helps to illustrate what I mean about the bibliography being a social as well as an intellectual tool. Many academic projects begin in a similar way, with newsletters, mimeographed bulletins, small journals, and the like—often pet projects of one or two people—all of which inevitably include citation lists. Those lists are crucial. One should not underestimate the social work that these lists do. Issue after issue, as the citations build up, they identify the network of scholars that have similar intellectual interests. This is a key part of discipline formation. 

After a while, the formative work that these lists do for the discipline tends to be obscured as new social uses develop, such as those I discussed earlier. For the HSS, over 100 years on, the bibliography has become an incredibly powerful resource for discovery in an ever expanding universe of scholarship in a sophisticated interdisciplinary landscape mediated by complex new technologies. The fact that HSS owns its data and its discovery service gives us an immense advantage over those fields that have to rely on search engines that are not designed with their own fields’ interests in mind. 

Let’s look at EBSCO, for a moment. HSS has a contract with them that allows them to publish the citations from IsisCB in their HSTM database. That is a great service, and it makes our data discoverable through a lot of library search applications. We are fortunate that they do this for us because it gets our publications out to people that might not come to HSS or know about IsisCB Explore. That said, and as much as I value groups like EBSCO, the HSTM database service would not even be possible if it were not for the work that my team does. Moreover, their employees do not understand our field or its interests or needs. They are in the business of distributing databases, many of which have a broad coverage, so their focus is on data distribution to a diverse set of users. As a result, their choices about how to discover and display our data don’t necessarily match the needs of our users.

The point is that what comes out of the IsisCB office is truly unmatched anywhere else. The scholars in those academic disciplines that don’t have a bibliography must use generalized search services and must develop ways to tweak their searches and narrow them to filter out a lot of results that will not be relevant. Think about how hard it is to find specific works by historians of science when you are looking in JSTOR or Google Scholar, for example. These resources have a place in our toolkit, and I wouldn’t give them up, but they cannot serve the same purpose as the Isis Bibliography. The CB is a different type of resource.

I’m clearly not the only one who thinks this. The Explore system is growing in popularity. If you look at our analytics, you can see a sharp uptick in the usage of IsisCB Explore since last year.

Figure 1. Number of active users of the IsisCB over the last year and a half. (Google Analytics)

We are getting about 1,500 users on the site each week now, which is close to twice what it was a year ago. You can also see that it is used by scholars around the world, reaching people who never had access to the printed CB. While between one third and one half of our users are in the United States, the other half is distributed widely across the globe.

Figure 2. Countries currently accessing IsisCB Explore. (Google Analytics)

Even anecdotally, I can testify to the system’s popularity. I regularly meet scholars who, when they find out I’m the bibliographer in charge of IsisCB Explore, thank me and tell me how helpful it is to their work and their teaching. This is flattering, but it is also the kind of feedback that I need in order to know that what I’m doing is working.

As bibliographer in charge of IsisCB Explore, I know that you have been active in the digital humanities (or DH, as it is often called) movement. From your perspective, what are the "digital humanities" and how have they changed the history of science? Do you have any thoughts about the future of the digital humanities?

I have been active in digital humanities since the early 2010s, ever since I started developing the online IsisCB Explore project. My own efforts on the CB were shaped by discussions with librarians, archivists, historians, and publishers who were all thinking big about what the digital world could do for us. I was welcomed into a community of scholars that was constantly working outside of the box in terms of how we do history, how scholarship is used, and indeed, even who our work is for. I would never have created IsisCB Explore if it had not been for the staunch support of the DH community in the history of science.

Digital humanities is an area that has both excited and disappointed me. I’ve been excited because it has yielded a lot of interesting and pathbreaking work. Ten years ago was a heady time for DH when people across a wide range of fields were experimenting with all sorts of uses of digital technology. Projects ranged from integrating gaming into teaching, to building tools that explore complex historical data, to setting up public websites to disseminate scholarship or encourage people outside academia to become their own historians. During that time, there was a lot of talk about what DH was. The answers were never conclusive, and the boundaries remained fuzzy, which I always considered a good thing. In the end, I think that fuzziness proved to be a liability when people started to ask where it fit in the academy. 

Although a lot of DH work was not polished or fully developed, the projects were innovative and creative, and they inspired people to do exciting work. While a lot of departments, like my own, established policies that took DH work into account as legitimate forms of creative activity when assessing tenure and promotion cases, for instance, many people and institutions remained suspicious of it. 

I’ve been disappointed by the trajectory of things recently. First, support all of a sudden dropped off the cliff. This was true even at institutions you would expect to be leaders in the field like MIT. This was not, I think, because there was no interest in funding digital initiatives but rather that priorities changed and money started chasing bigger corporate fish and large institutions. There were not enough funders to support small projects that one or a few scholars wanted to pursue. 

Funding was part of it, but the social media landscape changed as well. Digital humanities in the late 2010s came to be quite closely integrated with social media, and when the ground underneath that began to shift, it had implications for DH. Twitter turned into X, for example, and started to charge for some of its services. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook revealed a dark side that made many scholars wary of using them, and at that point a lot of communication channels broke down. That was a big blow to many DH efforts. 

Now we are witnessing the rise of AI, and that, I fear, is likely to suck up even more of the independent creative impulses that were at the heart of the DH movement a decade ago. While AI has the potential to unlock creative possibilities for scholars—I’ve used it to help me work on some projects related to the CB, for example—I worry that the technology has so many downsides, from centralization in big tech, to energy use, to data privacy, to ethical use of data, that we are a long way from understanding how to use it or how to normalize it. What I am most worried about is the increasing corporate dominance of our digital lives. This has extraordinary implications for our profession. How are we going to teach students? What are we going to teach them? Indeed, what is the purpose and nature of scholarship in a world of ever-present AI? 

* * *

To conclude, I consider my main work on the CB to be ensuring that the bibliographic enterprise with its search service continues to be useful and relevant for scholars. The CB is there to provide researchers, teachers, and students with the essential material that they need to do their work. It is a tool, and in order to ensure that it is a useful one, I am constantly trying to keep up with the needs and wants of the users, all the while navigating the challenges of an age of vast and rapid change.

Asilomar 2025: A Personal Reflection

Daniel Liu

The History of Science Society sponsored me to attend “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology” summit held on February 22–26, 2025, fifty years to the week of the famous Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in 1975. The “original” 1975 Asilomar conference had been convened by molecular biologists and microbiologists to discuss how to lift a 6 month-old, self-imposed moratorium on three kinds of transgenic and recombinant DNA research, namely 1) experiments that used plasmids conveying antibiotic resistance, 2) experiments that used plasmids conveying genes for producing toxins, and 3) recombination experiments with viral DNA, especially from oncoviruses.[1] “Asilomar” has since become shorthand for scientists’ capacities for self-regulation and self-governance, so much so that other scientific fields have made their own pilgrimages to the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, to have an “Asilomar moment” of their own. Many historians and social scientists have also been critical of Asilomar 1975, arguing that its overheated rhetoric never matched its limited regulatory framework, that it was self-serving for the interests of molecular biologists, that it allowed the profits of rDNA technology to be captured by a very few, that it lacked truly global representation and participation, and so on.

Three of the four lead organizers of 2025’s “The Spirit of Asilomar” are historians: Luis Campos (Rice), Michelle DiMeo, and David Cole (both of the Science History Institute). The fourth, Drew Endy (Stanford), has long been a leader in synthetic biology. Yet “The Spirit of Asilomar” was convened not to memorialize or historicize the Asilomar of 50 years ago, but to tackle current concerns about potential future biotechnologies. “The Spirit of Asilomar” was also organized to correct some of the shortcomings of Asilomar 1975. Asilomar 1975 had about 160 participants; besides 16 journalists and 3 lawyers, the rest were scientists in or adjacent to the field of molecular genetics.[2] In 1975, all but 11 participants came from the US, Western Europe, or Canada. Matthew Cobb recently discovered that three of the five Soviet participants were in fact leaders of the USSR’s vast bioweapons program.[3] Furthermore, in 1975 the agenda was singular: how to prevent potentially dangerous biological experiments from harming people inside and outside the laboratory. By contrast, Asilomar 2025 featured about 300 participants from over 25 countries, including Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the People’s Republic of China, and Singapore. Also included were numerous representatives from governments and private industry, as well as journalists, artists, social scientists, and by my count about 14 historians of science (including the SHI organizing team). 53 belonged to a cohort of early-career “Next Generation Leaders” selected from an open application pool. Finally, rather than being conceived around one high stakes safety issue, Asilomar 2025 was divided into 5 thematic groups: 1) pathogens and bioweapons research, 2) AI and biotech, 3) synthetic cells and mirror life, 4) environmental and non-conventional containment, and 5) a more loosely defined group on “Framing Biotechnology’s Future.”

What was it like to be a historian of mostly pre-1950 biology thrown into this mix? Before the summit I did not know what I was supposed to do, who or what I was supposed to represent (A: myself), and I did not know who most of the attendees would be. The participant roster was not shared until 2 days before the conference’s start. Faced with a lack of information and self-confidence, I did what historians of science are trained to do: I read. About two-and-a-half weeks before the conference started, the organizers distributed a short list of readings in a Google Drive folder and a Canvas course with an additional 200 readings divided across the five thematic groups. I involved myself in the thematic group on synthetic cells, which had on its reading list 5 books, 25 articles, and a 299-page “Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria” that was published (with some fanfare) in December 2024.[4] I participated in two of five Zoom office hours sessions the week before the summit, made some comments in a Google Docs sandbox, and did as much of the homework as I could. 

I wish I had done even more of my homework, but, to be perfectly honest, I also wish the other summit participants had done half as much of the reading as I had. I at least became roughly familiar with the historiography of Asilomar 1975 and clawed my way to familiarity with the state of the art in synthetic cell biology. As with any multidisciplinary meeting, we spent a lot of time introducing basic concepts to each other. Amid the excitement of meeting new people and learning new things, I lost count of how many times I felt our discussions slipping into overworn rhetorical grooves that my preparatory reading had warned me about—especially assumptions about public trust in science, representation, and hype cycles in the history of biotech. 

Colleagues in STS and sociology of science will doubtless roll their eyes at my naïveté (one friend already has), but “moral economy” unexpectedly became my favorite historiographical tool for taking our discussions into new directions. For historians of biology, moral economy is an oldie but goodie: it refers to the values and norms that govern how a scientific community exchanges ideas, materials, and credit or other non-monetary rewards. My touchstone references became Rob Kohler’s Lords of the Fly and Doogab Yi’s Recombinant University (neither of which were on the reading lists), because I found it was useful to have scientists talk about their own communities as a means to have them think about communities that are adjacent or even far away from their own circles. I love big ideas like co-construction, scientific representation, materiality, networks, and immutable mobiles as much as any other historian of science, but these more advanced ideas were not going to help me have eye-level conversations at an Asilomar.

Fiftieth anniversaries are usually times to celebrate endurance, reflect on successes and failures, and plan for the future. There have already been a lot of commemorations of Asilomar by historians (e.g., in 2001 for the 25th anniversary, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 44, no. 2; and in 2005 for the 30th anniversary, in Science as Culture, vol. 14). The fact that so many of us travelled to “The Spirit of Asilomar” in 2025 reflects Asilomar 1975’s durability, not least of which has been the continued use of the biosafety level (BSL) classification scheme for laboratory containment for which the 1975 meeting laid a foundation.

Putting on my historiography hat, I would say that the assumptions that Asilomar 1975 was flawed, did not do enough, or was too exclusive have themselves become a part of the mythology of Asilomar. I have come away from Asilomar 2025 convinced that these assumptions should not be left unquestioned. For example: should Asilomar 1975 have had more participants, or should it have had fewer, or was 160 the right number? Should an Asilomar-like meeting be narrow or broad? What is the scope of responsibilities scientists, historians, lawyers, and social scientists have towards society? I ask because attending Asilomar 2025 as a historian of science felt like an experience located somewhere on a spectrum shared with experimental archaeology (respectable!), Model UN (enriching and builds character!), and cosplay (innocent fun!). Because an enduring part of the Asilomar myth has been about its exclusivity and self-interestedness, a vocal contingent at our summit seemed predisposed not to trust the Asilomar 2025 process, whatever it was going to be. My experience was precisely the opposite: the synthetic cell biologists that I spent most of my time with were open-minded, honest, and eager to learn from historians and social scientists—and we did have a lot to learn from each other. Might 300 participants actually have been too many? My challenge, if I could even call it that, was neither trust nor lack of communication, but in reconciling future-oriented rhetoric with current technical realities—sorting out the “Why are we doing this?” questions from the “What are we doing?” ones.  If I had a single takeaway for historians of science, it is this: scientists are eager to learn from us, and as Jane Maienschein counseled in her 2024 Sarton Medal Q&A, we need to be willing to drill down to the technical details of what they are doing in order to be grounded in reality rather than hype.

At the 1975 meeting three working groups (on bacterial plasmids and phages, on animal viruses, and eukaryotic rDNA) gave prepared reports to all 160 participants, which they had been working on since November 1974. In 2025 we arrived in Pacific Grove with some agenda items and a goal to write reports at the conference. This work was scattered not just over the 5 thematic groupings but further subdivided across 17 working groups which we were free to bounce between, plus a delightful set of 8 “recombination” sessions that shuffled us into new groupings for a morning. This Asilomar 2025 process was meant to activate new ideas and voices, but this combo of open-endedness and fragmentation made it hard for us to decide what our destinations ought to be. At the time of writing this reflection, work has continued via Google Docs through 26 draft “entreaties” ranging from 1 to 16 pages long (plus one video) that await comment. Some of these address issues that were raised in sessions I was not in; I disagree with at least 3 of the entreaty drafts. Entreaties that receive 30 endorsements out of ca. 300 participants “will be made publicly available as official summit output(s),” illustrating how difficult it is to balance broad consensus versus the desire to support minority voices. 

If Asilomar 1975 or Asilomar 2025 are worth criticizing, then what should Asilomar have been? In 1975 molecular biologists realized they had the moral and legal responsibility to protect laboratory workers and the immediate communities around their labs, and this laid the foundation for the BSL containment guidelines. If I may read Susan Wright against the grain: Had there not been a durable policy consensus at Asilomar 1975, would that conference have been worth remembering?[5] By far the most productive part of Asilomar 2025 was the attempt to develop a framework for “Environmental Safety Levels” for field-testing engineered organisms; this was only one of many parallel discussions, and I had chosen to pursue other ones. For all of the scientific talent and technological prowess I encountered at “The Spirit of Asilomar” in 2025, I do not think we felt ourselves endowed with the moral authority to unilaterally fix climate change or rebalance the global inequality of biotech resources. The closest we came to a consensus statement was a condemnation of the development, stockpiling, and use of biological weapons. Yet the draft bioweapons entreaty is clear that our power is not moral or political, but “merely technical,” if I may quote Ted Porter.[6] It calls for “an aggressive surge in deployment of tools” (by whom? Western countries? Militaries?) that could technologically neuter currently running bioweapons programs in Russia and DPR Korea, nations that were not represented at Asilomar 2025 and where we had no direct sway.

A couple times during the summit, Luis Campos quoted a line by David Baltimore from 1975, that in the idyllic setting of Asilomar we were working “in splendid isolation from the rest of the world.” This feeling of splendid isolation cut many ways for me: not only are the Asilomar Conference Grounds splendidly isolated, but I myself have been living in splendid isolation from US politics for over 6 years. In February 2025, I was back in the United States during the early weeks of the second Trump administration. I had been riveted and outraged for four weeks by news coming from faraway Washington, DC. Then, at Asilomar, I ran into a wall of collective silence. During formal and informal discussions, people would mumble the phrase “political moment” but failed to further specify what they meant, as if the elision made it easier to comprehend. I rarely heard anyone utter the names of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr., or of any other officials trying to dismantle the current funding and governance structures of public research in the US. A parallel conference at Asilomar by the US Geological Survey had an aura of doom around it. This collective silence from my US colleagues infuriated me, and I know I was not alone. The direct damage the second Trump administration is doing to US scientific research and its governance is calculable and can be stated plainly.[7] It was unnerving to go through a conference in the US where we imagined new ideas for good scientific governance while the 3-to-5-letter governing institutions that enforce such measures are being dismantled. 

I am sure some of this was meant to insulate our international colleagues from events in the US, and, looking back, it would have felt more normal to hold a summit about scientific governance in Aachen, Accra, or Astana in 2025. But I also fear that a revolt against governance and gatekeepers is not limited to the political culture of the far right in the US, but has been cutting across the political spectrum in manifold ways for a while. As a newcomer to synthetic biology meetings, I was distressed to find that more than a few synthetic biologists hold up the open-source movement in computer software as a model for scientific governance, and have imbibed a 1990s-vintage programmer’s ethos that openness and freedom of participation are sufficient moral ends in themselves.[8] For all of the world-transforming benefits that open-source software has brought, we should not forget that it laid the foundations for today’s digital technologies for censorship, propaganda, and malicious disinformation, and that a preponderance of the financial gain from open source has accumulated in the hands of a few. Open-source software ecosystems place questions of responsibility largely in the hands of the users of these technologies, not their creators. And Asilomar 2025 was full of creators: most of the scientists I met were both university-affiliated and either had their own biotech startups or worked with one. We should not forget that ChatGPT/GPT 3.5 was recklessly rolled out to the public for free at the end of 2022 because OpenAI, supposedly one of the safety-oriented AI organizations, thought nobody would be interested in a flawed product that could not distinguish between convincingness and correctness. An “AI Asilomar” happened in in 2017, but looking back from 2025 the banality of the “Asilomar AI Principles” is as comical as the realization of who we were sharing the conference facilities with.[9]

I admired the ambition of “The Spirit of Asilomar.” The summit taught me a lot and helped me grow as a person, and I do hope that at least the ESL and bioweapons statement drafts gain some longer-term traction. I am confident that everyone at Asilomar 2025 left with their own takeaways about the summit, and I am sure that the other 13 historians of science who were there have different interpretations than mine. For my part, I left Pacific Grove less cynical about Asilomar as an ideal. I fear that our ideals about a socially reflective and rules-based future for biotech in 2025 has the unfortunate timing of running into attacks by a global reactionary movement that is dominated by people who not only want to break the rules but who revel in forcing others to suffer the consequences. And even if Asilomar 2025 is ultimately about scientists’ self-interests, as a historian who was invited into the room as an equal, I take comfort in the fact that the scientists I met are open and reflective enough to ask us about what their self-interests and responsibilities ought to be. At Asilomar I found scientists who are asking historians of science to speak and contribute to a vision of science for the future, based on what we have learned about science in the past. We should not remain silent.

[1] Paul Berg et al., “Potential Biohazards of Recombinant DNA Molecules.,” PNAS 71, no. 7 (July 1974): 2593–94, doi:10.1073/pnas.71.7.2593.

[2] Donald S. Fredrickson, “Asilomar and Recombinant DNA: The End of the Beginning,” in Biomedical Politics, ed. Kathi E. Hanna (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1991), 258–98, doi:10.17226/1793.

[3] Matthew Cobb, “Money and Murder: The Dark Side of the Asilomar Meeting on Recombinant DNA,” Nature 638, no. 8051 (February 17, 2025): 603–6, doi:10.1038/d41586-025-00457-w.

[4] Katarzyna P. Adamala et al., “Confronting Risks of Mirror Life,” Science 386, no. 6728 (December 12, 2024): 1351–53, doi:10.1126/science.ads9158; Katarzyna Adamala et al., “Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks,” 2024, doi:10.25740/CV716PJ4036.

[5] Susan Wright, Molecular Politics, 1972–1982 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Susan Wright, “Legitimating Genetic Engineering,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44, no. 2 (March 2001): 235–47, doi:10.1353/pbm.2001.0040.

[6] Theodore M. Porter, “How Science Became Technical,” Isis 100, no. 2 (June 2009): 292–309, doi:10.1086/599552.

[7] See https://scienceimpacts.org

[8] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fads

[9] https://futureoflife.org/principles/principled-ai-discussion-asilomar/, and https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/beneficial-ai-conference-develops-asilomar-ai-principles-to-guide-future-ai-research

An Interview with Matthew Soleiman, Author of “Mechanisms of Experience”

Interview by Isis Editors

Matthew Soleiman is a PhD Candidate in the History of Science and Science Studies at the University of California at San Diego. 

His article, “Mechanisms of Experience: Cognitivism, Cybernetics, and the Postwar Science of Pain” appeared in the latest issue of Isis.

Your article, “Mechanisms of Experience,” investigates how the postwar intellectual traditions of cybernetics and cognitivism provided the conditions for articulating a new theory of pain. Could you tell us a little about how this topic caught your attention?

Historians, social scientists, and neuroscientists have all presented Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall's gate control theory as a seismic shift, even a "revolution," in the history of the modern mind and brain sciences. They have done so not just because of how the theory reconceptualized the fundamental nature of pain, but because of how it challenged the persistent (western) distinction between "mind" and "body."  (This was in fact the explicit aim of Melzack and Wall.) In my past lives as a neuroscientist and science writer, I also found that the theory, or at least its basic tenets, had become almost dogma among practicing neuroscientists. Upon scouring the literature for the intellectual origins of this enduring theory, I noticed that historians had either little to say on the topic, or that they, like Melzack and Wall, projected the field of pain research that emerged from gate control theory back in time, prior to when it was invented. Hence, I became curious about the broader intellectual conditions that made the theory possible before there was a formal, self-conscious "pain science." 

What were some interesting or unexpected finds you came across during the course of your research? 

While I knew that Melzack first met Wall at MIT, where Wall was already part of a neurophysiology group led by the famous cybernetician Warren McCulloch, I did not expect to find a real connection between Melzack and cybernetics before Melzack arrived at MIT. To my surprise, I discovered both in published papers and archival documents I located at the American Philosophical Society that Melzack's postdoctoral mentor, the University of Oregon neurosurgeon William Livingston, spoke at the second of the cybernetics (or Macy) conferences. (Livingston and McCulloch seem to have become good friends after the event.) With these sources in hand, I explored the influence of cybernetics on Melzack prior to his collaboration with Wall. 

Are there any points you are passionate about that you couldn’t include in the article, which you'd like to share with readers here?

There are many, but I will limit myself to just two. With the publication of gate control theory in 1965, Melzack and Wall contributed to an emerging movement for patient autonomy. Indeed, the two scientists tried to naturalize such autonomy. Implicit in their theory was the idea that a patient's reports of pain captured the dynamics of the nervous system as a whole. Since these dynamics involved countless interactions between nerves, synapses, and pathways, a clinician could never rely on a single component, or even a subset of components, to independently verify a patient’s reported experience. The nature of pain, in Melzack and Wall's view, was inconsistent with medical paternalism. As Wall later remarked, “you'd better listen to what the patient says and believe what they say, don't have some abstract pseudo-scientific idea that they shouldn't be in pain."

I also wish I had the chance to explore Livingston and McCulloch's correspondence about the potential restructuring of the central nervous system, or its plasticity, especially in regard to Livingston's patients with chronic pain. Their discussion took place just as Donald Hebb was formulating his neuropsychological theory about the growth of new connections in the brain during learning (in 1946).  

What was one book or article that influenced how you approach this topic? 

A book that became essential to my research was Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers' The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War, published in 2018 with the University of Chicago Press. In their book, Geroulanos and Meyers introduce the term "integrationism" for the mechanistic yet holistic style of thought they locate in physiology and neurology of the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as in the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. Geroulanos and Meyers' analysis helped me see how Melzack and Wall were able to use cognitivist and cybernetic ideas to integrate the mind and the body. I consider my article to be a kind of sequel to the story Geroulanos and Meyers tell in The Human Body.

What questions did this work leave you with? Do you have any plans to build on this research?

As history is written in and for the present, I was immediately left with the question of how my argument could help account for the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States. Scholars and journalists now know that pain researchers advocated for greater opioid prescribing well before the introduction of Purdue Pharma's OxyContin into the American pharmaceutical market in 1996. This presented me with a historical puzzle. Melzack and Wall developed gate control theory as a holistic theory of pain. The interdisciplinary field of pain research that arose from the spread of this theory was similarly holistic in its ideas and practices. And yet, opioids seem to be a fairly reductionistic technology of pain relief. I am currently preparing another article that attempts to solve this puzzle. This article and my article in Isis form part of a larger book project, which traces the birth and afterlife of a holistic concept of pain over the twentieth century.

Note from the EO

John Paul Gutierrez

The past few months have been taxing. HSS has not been untouched by the executive orders issued by the current administration in the United States. It’s made managing and planning events and programs at HSS difficult. HSS currently receives funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Our NASA Fellowship has been paused, but we hope that we will be able to continue the Fellowship in 2026-2027. Our NSF grant (HSS administers this grant for 10 other societies) is moving along as usual, with great uncertainty about whether we will receive funds for the remainder of the grant term. Diversity and inclusivity were baked into the proposal when we applied and received this grant. The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has flagged our grant. A list of flagged grants has been circulated, and I (as the Principal Investigator) and HSS were on this list. In an abundance of caution, I took staff contact details off our website to prevent harassment. 

In my previous life, I worked for a scholarly society in Communication, and I commissioned articles about Gamergate. I was then “gamer-gated.” This experience made me sensitive to making staff and volunteers vulnerable to online harassment. It also creates an atmosphere of censorship due to fear. HSS aims to provide members with tools to take the next steps in advocating for the field and academic freedom. 

In April, we provided opportunities, through the Union of Concerned Scientists, for members to learn how to ask questions at town hall meetings and how to write editorials. On 7 May, we will partner with PEN America, offering a workshop for members who want to speak out, discuss how they can prepare for potential harassment, and review the steps they can take to prevent it. HSS, under the guidance of the Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity, will continue to examine resources we can provide for members to take action. 

Times are undeniably tough for academic institutions and scholarly societies, and we cannot rely on the government to foster a free and inclusive environment where research and scholarship thrive. This will come from us, the individual members of HSS, practicing kindness to each other, our friends, and family, and underscored by our members’ commitment to meticulous research and writing. ¡Vamos!

Letter from the President

Evelynn Hammonds

To the History of Science Society Community,

Let me begin by stating the obvious: since the beginning of the second presidential term of Donald J. Trump in January of this year, there has been a continuous and escalating assault on institutions that are at the core of the work we do as historians of science. First, the Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” has resulted in the censoring of historical content on federal government websites, the defunding of museums, the papering over of interpretive panels in current exhibits, the scrubbing of words and acronyms on monuments, and the shutdown of archives. Second, the Trump administration is dismantling the institutions that provide the largest amount of public funding for the scientific and medical research enterprise by shutting down centers and offices that fund research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) along with other agencies that fund research in myriad scientific and technical fields.

Make no mistake about it: the goals of these efforts have and will continue to negatively affect the work we do as historians of science. The very core of our work is under assault. As a statement by the American Historical Association noted, the Executive Order  “…represents a disturbing attack on core institutions and the public presentation of history, and indeed on historians and history itself.”  While this order claims to be restoring one specific narrative of history that glorifies the past, what the order actually aims to do is to elevate a historical narrative that suppresses the voices of historically excluded groups and sanitizes and eliminates aspects of history that this administration dislikes. A statement by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) notes, “This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.”

Science is under attack, too.  By shuttering offices, stopping currently funded research projects at the NIH, NSF, and other science agencies without review or due process, this administration wants to control every aspect of scientific work and direct it toward its own specific interests without being held accountable to the public that funds it. As reported in Science magazine in February, “…[m]any scientists remain in limbo at the thousands of academic institutions and nongovernmental agencies that rely on federal research grants.” At the same time, the administration also violates many of the laws that govern these same science agencies.

Lastly, it is not just science and history that are under attack at this moment, but also educational institutions. Many of us work in colleges and universities that are dependent upon the funding of scientific and medical research to support other core aspects of our educational institutions. The restrictions on research funding will therefore also affect what we can teach. More importantly, this administration is threatening to censor what we are allowed to teach in every field, while undermining academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

With this crisis comes opportunities to defend what we do as historians and engage more deeply in our own work. I believe that historians of science and this society have a unique opportunity in this crisis to support more collaboration among our members and produce more compelling work for a broader public. Our work can illuminate, among other themes, the value of scientific research and the challenges to it in our democracy at this moment. We must not remain silent. The statement by the OAH said it best:

“We must remain steadfast in our defense of the right to engage with history, honestly, even when that history challenges our assumptions and forces us to confront uncomfortable realities. …[we must] embrace the complexity and diversity of America’s past that is grounded in the documentary record and that fosters critical thinking. promotes understanding, and ultimately strengthens our nation and our world.”

Evelynn M. Hammonds, PhD

President of the History of Science Society

F O R U M & O T H E R A W A R D S 

EARLY SCIENCES FORUM AND EARLY SCIENCE AND MEDICINE SECOND ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE 

Awardee: Brian S. K. Li, author of "Towards an Interpretive Epidemiology of the Glass Delusion in Early Modern Europe," 

Runner-up: Chang Xu for the essay "Military Technology and Formulaic Body: Therapeutic, Toxic, and Incendiary Drug Formulas in Early Modern China." 

FHHS DISSERTATION PRIZE 

Awardee: Erik Baker for “Entrepreneurial: Management Expertise and the Reinvention of the American Work Ethic” 

Honorable Mention: David Robertson for “Crazy Standards: The World Health Organization, Psychiatric Epidemiology and the Remaking of Psychiatry.” 

FHHMLS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS GRADUATE STUDENT ESSAY 

Awardee: Cam Cannon, Doctoral Candidate in American Studies at George Washington University and a 2024- 25 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Awarded for their essay "Contextualizing Harry Benjamin: Diagnosis, Access, and the Struggle for Gender-Affirming Care in the US." 

SKLAC DISSERTATION PRIZE 

Awardee: Angélica Márquez-Osuna and her dissertation from Harvard University “The Persistence of Beekeeping Knowledge in the Yucatan Peninsula, 1780-1950.”

  S A R T O N M E D A L

  JANE MAIENSCHEIN 

Jane Maienschein is a distinguished scholar at Arizona State University (ASU), and has earned numerous university accolades, including University Professor, Regents’ Professor, President’s Professor, Parents Association Professor, and Director of the Center for Biology and Society. At the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, she holds the rare title of Fellow. For over forty years, Jane has been a leading figure in the history and philosophy of science. Her prolific research includes five books, 14 edited volumes, over 95 research articles, and 41 editorials and op-eds, covering topics from embryology, genetics, and evolution to regenerative medicine and public policy. Her work exemplifies rigorous historical investigations that illuminate current science and public health issues. 

Jane's contributions to the history and philosophy of biology are foundational. Her first monograph, Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880-1915 (1991), analyzed the shift in American biology from descriptive to experimental methodologies. Her work has significantly influenced the field, bringing new scholars into the history of biology. She has also integrated philosophy into the history of biology, emphasizing that historical and sociological contexts are crucial in understanding scientific experiments. 

Jane's early scholarship established enduring approaches to experimental and American biology histories. She emphasized the importance of experimental methods in biology and explored how historical context influences scientific acceptance. Her practice of "practical history," where she recreated historical experiments, has inspired many historians and philosophers of science.

Her extensive work includes critical studies of cell and developmental biology, bridging the gap between historical and contemporary scientific issues. Jane's second major book, Whose View of Life? (2003), examined the historical and policy aspects of embryology, providing insights into contemporary debates on reproduction and stem cell research. Her public engagement and clear communication have made complex scientific issues accessible to broader audiences. 

Jane's dedication to building diverse and inclusive scholarly communities is evident in her teaching, mentorship, and administrative efforts. She has mentored numerous students and early-career scholars, many of whom have achieved significant positions in interdisciplinary institutions. Jane co-founded the Embryo Project Encyclopedia and the MBL History Project, providing valuable resources for public and academic audiences. 

For 35 years, she has co-directed the History of Biology summer seminar at MBL, fostering collaboration among historians, philosophers, and scientists. Her latest initiative (co-founded and run with Kate MacCord), the McDonnell Initiative at MBL, promotes interdisciplinary research on regeneration, highlighting the importance of collaboration across disciplines. 

Jane's extensive service to disciplinary societies, including her term as President of HSS and the Board of Directors of AAAS, showcases her commitment to advancing the field. Her leadership and organizational skills have created inclusive spaces for scholarly work, making her a highly deserving recipient of the Sarton Medal. 

By Kate MacCord

P F I Z E R A W A R D 

PROJIT MUKHARJI 

Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 

1920–66 (University of Chicago Press, 2022). 

Brown Skins, White Coats is a path-breaking study of the mutability of concepts of race in a setting where historians have tended to overlook racial thinking entirely. The book is a crucial intervention into the history of race science, a model for historicizing race beyond racial binaries and a reminder of the unexpected forms that scientific racism has taken—including the racialization of the senses. Projit Mukharji uncovers the efforts of scientists in India in the decades bracketing independence to impose biological divisions on a society that resisted such reductionism. He shows how Indian scientists constructed putatively “endogamous” 

communities based on ascribed religious and caste identities while ignoring evidence of the fluidity of social and reproductive relations. “Seroanthropology” is the term he introduces to underscore the influence of this shape-shifting research program, which has nonetheless been conveniently forgotten. His narrative skillfully juxtaposes the technical reasoning of geneticists with cultural sources that speak of human relationships that did not conform to geneticists’ categories. Mukharji’s account is also an eloquent commentary on nationalism in the postcolonial world. Far from demonizing practitioners of race science in India, he encourages us to see them through the lens of an updated concept of alienation, one that dispenses with the imagination of a lost primordial community. His evocation of a “Brown planetary humanism” exemplifies the value and urgency of humanistic reasoning today. Brown Skins, White Coats also makes a bold methodological intervention by developing a new form of “critical fabulation” alongside its meticulous empirical research. In interleaved chapters, the book offers a fictive correspondence that serves as a counter-archive to the history of seroanthropology. Through these letters, Mukharji reminds us that the genre of science fiction was an important site for confronting the dangers of eugenics in India. The letters give voice to a critique of genetic determinism that was and remains compelling and that would not otherwise be present in the archives. This inventive and moving book is a model of engaged history of science.

D A V I S P R I Z E 

THERESA LEVITT 

Theresa Levitt’s Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life offers a captivating history of organic chemistry through the lens of perfumes and soaps. Levitt skillfully reveals how these mundane objects not only shaped the foundational debates of chemistry, but also played a key role in significant historical events. From eighteenth-century French perfumeries to the chemical research laboratories of just-industrializing Germany, Elixir delights readers in a journey of fraud, academic politics, and the challenges of the early Chemical Revolution. Perfume, it turns out, was a matter of life and death during the French Revolution—soap and gunpowder depended on the same chemicals, which were in short supply. Who knew that Napoleon Bonaparte used (and even drank) perfume or that Marie Antoinette’s escape plot was foiled in part by her addiction to fragrance? 

Levitt shows how the complex politics of hygiene and health were intertwined with commercial endeavors to produce these elusive substances and the scientific efforts to understand them. While early chemists focused on the identification of the number and nature of elements that make up these molecules, the answer turned out to be in their specific structures—a discovery that required bold guesses and unconventional methods. Through this tale of rivalries and revolutions, both political and intellectual, Levitt explores profound questions about the structure of living things, the difference betweenthe natural and the synthetic, and the origin of life in a history of chemistry that is accessible, fun, and deeply fascinating. 

H A Z E N P R I Z E 

BABAK ASHRAFI 

This year the Committee on Education and Engagement wishes to award the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize to Babak Ashrafi, Executive Director of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Since its founding in 2007 the CHSTM has grown tremendously and had an outsized impact on the field for scholars and students of history as well as the public. Dr. Ashrafi’s enthusiastic supporters emphasize the way he has and continues to build community among historians of science and regularly seeks out new opportunities and ideas to better our field. These have included the Consortium’s virtual working groups (reaching thousands of scholars worldwide), podcasts, a cross-institutional search hub linking collections across member institutions, and in-person public events in Philadelphia. For the many graduate students and early career scholars CHSTM has supported, Dr. Ashrafi is an important mentor and supporter not only in research but communication, networking, and public engagement. In less than two decades CHSTM has become a leader in supporting and promoting the history of science and educators in history of science. We would also like to specifically recognize Dr. Ashrafi’s work with HSS and the Centennial Committee in the production of the HSS@100 podcast series. This work helps celebrate 100 years of HSS and gives the history of science a wider audience.

P A U L Y P R I Z E 

LAURA MARTIN 

The Philip J. Pauly Prize committee is delighted to award this year’s prize to Laura J. Martin for her remarkable book Wild By Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration. This insightful and meticulously researched work traces the history of ecological restoration, from its early 20th-century origins to its current status as a cornerstone of environmental science and policy. Martin’s novel genealogy of restoration ecology skillfully ties together a wide array of seemingly disparate threads into a compelling historical narrative. Whereas previous scholars have often focused on the divide between conservation and preservation, Martin reveals the vibrant past and present of a critical third path, restoration. Martin’s book extends beyond the sual cast of characters typically encountered by historians of science. This approach helps Wild By Design bridge gaps between the history of science and related fields – especially environmental history. Martin’s rigorous scholarship is coupled with strong storytelling that will appeal to a broad audience, including practicing scientists and the general public. Wild By Design goes beyond analyzing the past and showcases the power of history to influence contemporary practices. It stands out for its hopeful perspective. While offering a critical examination of how the legacies of race, gender, and settler colonialism have shaped ecological practices in the US, Martin also uncovers paths not taken—paths that could inspire a more just and sustainable future. The balance between critique and optimism makes her book a vital and timely contribution to the field, offering imaginative resources for those working toward environmental justice today. Martin’s eloquent prose and careful analysis demonstrate the profound impact that history can have on both understanding and shaping the present. Wild By Design is an outstanding example of what the history of science can accomplish, making it a worthy recipient of the Pauly Prize.

  L E V I N S O N P R I Z E 

RUTH ROGASKI 

We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize: Ruth Rogaski’s Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Our committee unanimously selected Knowing Manchuria for its epic scope, beautiful writing, innovative use of a range of sources, and what we see as its profound potential to impact the field of the history of science. Rogaski’s incisive analysis explores the living and non-living parts of Manchuria—a region that covers more than half a million square miles at the intersection of present-day China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia—and reorients scholarship on empire, environment, and imagination. Rogaski’s account engages historical actors from all of these regions and ranges over a tumultuous three-and-a half centuries. Each chapter explores a different dimension of place-making and sensorial perception, resolutely focused on what it means to know a place. The environment of Manchuria in Rogaski’s telling includes fossils, animals, land and water formations, spirits, and disease, and each of these entities is treated as historically constructed and culturally maintained. As Rogaski’s work teaches us, hidden mountains relied as much as dragons on the powers of imagination, and, like bacteria, required strenuous documentation and forms of communication to make them real. We are eager to teach with Knowing Manchuria and appreciate how Rogaski generously builds upon and clearly reorients our scholarly conversations within the history of the life sciences. 

P R I C E / W E B S T E R 

P R I Z E 

TAYLOR M. MOORE 

“An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt.” Isis 2023 114:3, 469-489. Employing multiple narrative registers, Taylor M. Moore illustrates the possibilities of a decolonial materialist history of science. In this compelling article, she does so by honing in on the rhinoceros horn brought from Egypt to the Wellcome collection by anthropologist Winifred Blackman in the late 1920s. Instead of relaying the typical story of the object’s entrenchment in existing European interpretations, Moore uses the medio-magical amulet to unpack “an Egyptian global science,” destabilizing Eurocentric accounts of science thereby. What results is a compelling study that illuminates the role of Egyptian peasants and Sudanese wise women and healers in a Trans-Saharan economy of a mid nineteenth century nation-state. Moore’s article clarifies the ways these layers have always been connected, even if earlier scholarship failed to connect them. She offers a model for what is possible as our field develops the capacity for “new possibilities for the history of science and new narrative forms for writing history.” A healthy dose of reflexivity guides Moore through the ever-present risks of replicating certain fascinations and interpretive gestures which animated Blackman as a British, colonial anthropologist in the first place. The author sets out a concrete set of interpretive strategies to complicate and resist this seduction. In addition to the powerfully diverse sources used in the article, the jury was especially excited by Moore’s provocative and inspiring attempt to cut through a number of dichotomies which still pervade the historiography of science: center/periphery, modern/primitive, and especially reason/superstition. The article offers a robust research agenda for an even wider and more inclusive decolonial history of global science.

R A I N G E R P R I Z E 

GUSTAVE LESTER 

The Ronald Rainger Award Committee awarded this year's Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences to Gustave Lester for his article, “Land, Fur, and Copper: The Union of Settler Colonialism and Industrial Capitalism in the Great Lakes Region, 1815–1842.” Gustave Lester’s article demonstrates superior argumentation based on an impressive empirical source base. Previous scholarship in the history of earth and environmental science has suggested that natural resource surveys on the American frontier connected discoveries to potential markets. Lester’s article emphasizes that shifts in the political economy of the copper mining region of what is now the state of Michigan were based on Indigenous knowledge of the land originating from as early as 7000 years ago, rather than on Euro American colonial knowledge. Notably suitable for this award, Lester’s article aligns the history of earth and environmental science with broader debates about settler colonialism, geological exploration, American empire, and Indigenous land rights. It tells a story that combines western scientific knowledge of a supposedly newly discovered landscape with Indigenous knowledge of an ancient homeland. In a large field of strong submissions this year, Lester marshaled a variety of textual sources to contextualize geological exploration in early-nineteenth century America in the history of Indigenous land expropriation. In so doing, Lester shows that mineral prospecting ultimately mattered less to settler appropriation of Indigenous lands than an expansionist approach to land seizure did. This marks a signal contribution to the expanding historiography of earth sciences in the crucible of empire. 

R E I N G O L D P R I Z E 

MICHELE D. PFLUG 

The 2024 Nathan Reingold Prize has been awarded to Michele D. Pflug for her article, “‘Ha? Where the Devil Got You Names?’: The Gendered Politics of Naming Naturalia Before Linnaeas.” The essay explores the complexities of naming in pre-Linnaean natural history, revealing a multimedia world of images, specimens, and names that extended beyond language alone. The paper highlights the role of women in this domain, showing how gendered restrictions on education and taxonomic publication were sometimes circumvented through visual and collaborative practices. Focusing on figures like Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, Cassandra Willoughby, and Eleanor Glanville, the author reconstructs how these women engaged in natural history despite societal barriers. The essay carefully examines their strategies for navigating the male-dominated field, including concealing their identities and collaborating with men. Notably, the author utilizes plays, courtroom dramas, letters, and catalogues to vividly recreate the experiences of these women botanists. The essay is praised for its original research, detailed analysis, and engaging writing, offering a fresh perspective on the history of natural history and women’s contributions to science. This innovative work sheds new light on the overlooked role of women in scientific naming practices before Linnaeus.

R O S S I T E R P R I Z E 

CHRISTOFFER BASSE ERIKSON & XINYI WEN 

Christoffer Basse Eriksen and Xinyi Wen, "Colouring Flower Books, Art, and Experiment in the household of Margery and Henry Power.” The British Journal of the History of Science (2023), 56, 21-43. In “Colouring Flower Books,” Eriksen and Wen persuasively highlight the contributions of female artists to the history of early modern science by focusing on the household of Henry Power, a well-regarded English experimental philosopher. The article reveals the previously invisible, yet critical role of the epistemic labor of Power's wife, Margery. From the 1650’s, the couple together studied the elusive presentation of color, together probing refractive qualities of colour under the microscope. Eriksen and Wen meticulously document the subtle record in Margery’s drawing album, hand colouring flower books, and various chemical and paper technologies available to her at home, including books, paper slips and recipe books. Margery’s sophisticated knowledge of plants, her artistic sensibility towards color, and her experimental and imaginative methods contributed to a regularized colour system that had a significant impact on early modern microscopy, most visibly through the reputation of her husband, Henry Power. The committee was particularly impressed with the authors’ careful attention to Margery’s records on chemical substances, procedures, and technologies that framed the understanding of color in early modern microscopy. The essay is a significant addition to the history of science emphasizing the importance of the underappreciated role of the household, and especially women, to the making of scientific knowledge. 

G E R J U O Y / M I C H E L L 

DEREK NELSON

Derek Nelson is awarded the Edward Gerjuoy / John Michell Award for the best abstract by an independent scholar for his abstract for "Shipworms and the Origins of Marine Invasive Theory." Nelson's abstract manages to be both compelling and thorough while being very concise. The committee members were particularly impressed by how Nelson managed to convey not just the topic of his paper but his argument, all in an efficient and clear manner. Furthermore, that argument offers an original correction to received stories about the history of the "science of the sea." 

Science on a Trip: Bringing History of Nuclear Science to Children  

Maria Rentetzi

November 2024

What is it like to be Alice in Wonderland? And what if Alice wants to tell stories about science to children? This is how I felt visiting the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in April 2024, a leading event in the publishing industry. One of three most visited book fairs in the world, the 2024 exhibition attracted more than 1,500 publishers from over 94 countries, visitors exceeded 32,000 over four days, and it featured some of the most well-published authors and artists of children’s books.

FIGURE 1

Oliver Jeffrey, a renowned visual artist and author at the 2024 Bologna Fair. He tells a packed audience that to him, words are “physical things.” 

Photo: Maria Rentetzi, 2024

Reconciling trade and culture, the Bologna international trade fair for children’s publishing was bursting with delightful serendipity, imagination, a full color palette, and enthusiasm. Stories were told, illustrated, wonderfully colored, and even stitched.   

FIGURE 2

Tailored Stories, by a new Colombia-based company Maravillarte in collaboration with Kreaktiva Lab. Karen Loewy, head of Kreaktiva has described the product as “wearable stories:” children’s clothing that features a QR code leading to a voice-narrated story. 

Photo: Maria Rentetzi, 2024

The book fair began in 1964 when a group of ambitious Italian literary scholars and publishers felt that the Frankfurt Book Fair (established in 1949) was sidelining children’s books. In this gap they saw an opportunity for establishing a fair dedicated to children’s books in Bologna, a city with a long literary history. Maria Bartolozzi, an expert in children’s literature at the Centro Didattico Nazionale di Studi e Documentazione (Educational Center for Studies and Documentation), the publisher Renato Giunti, literary critic and professor of education Enzo Petrini, and the illustrator Marcella Fuci, were among the first who helped make Bologna’s fair “the place to be” for children’s literature and picture books. On April 4, 1964 the fair made its debut at the Palazzo di Re Enzo in the city’s medieval center, with 44 exhibitors from 11 countries. The British delegation of publishers—then considered the leading nation in children’s publishing—outnumbered the French. The organizers were also able to attract Franklin Watts, the strongest US publisher at the time.[1]

Amid the Cold War, the Bologna Fair became central to Italy’s cultural diplomacy. Ella Gankina, an expert in Russian and Soviet illustration, also joined the fair and “returned home with glowing reports.”[2] She eventually fostered the participation of numerous USSR publishing houses beginning in 1965. Four years later, and after strong negotiations, she ensured the attendance of the well-known graphic artist and illustrator, Vitalij Gorjaev.[3] Since then, the Bologna Fair has shaped the children’s literary world and anticipated future literary trends in children’s book publishing.  

Throughout the years, the exhibition attracted an amazing number of young illustrators, authors, and publishers worldwide and established prestigious awards, subsequently creating one of the strongest sectors of the publishing industry. During the pandemic, when parents were forced to stay home and entertain their kids with fiction and fantasy, the industry saw two years of robust expansion, becoming one of the most rapidly growing industries at the time. The pandemic also had a significant impact on reading habits and formats. Physical books were increasingly replaced by ebooks and audiobooks, creating new opportunities for digital publishing and platforms. New genres debuted. Environmental concerns, diversity and gender were expressed in picture books while voices from the Global South became louder. In the US in 2022, close to one-third of all books sold were children’s books, and the total publishing industry revenue on a global scale was up to 9.9 billion US dollars.[4]

Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, I ended up in a fantasy world of colorful, joyful children’s books where stories carry a strong message but always with hope, and where the unreal becomes astonishingly possible. Ironically the bigger the industry becomes, the more difficult it is to publish as a new author or illustrator. Most of the presses do not accept unsolicited submissions. I saw long queues of young women and men holding their portfolios, waiting in line to talk to a publisher. I found myself chatting with some of them on our way to the venue. Although in the fifth decade of my life and with a totally different career, we shared the same aim: to pitch our ideas. Wandering around the exhibitors’ booths, I, too, was looking for a press willing to publish my first picture book for children. Efforts to make appointments with publishers ahead of time were in vain. I soon realized that this is one of the toughest publishing industries to get into. As an academic and historian of nuclear science, one would guess that my stiff writing could not convince any children’s book publisher, let alone young readers. Against all odds, Clavis Publishing, one of the most renowned Belgian publishers in the children’s book industry, committed to bring my dream to reality. 

I was fortunate to meet Philippe Werck, the owner of Clavis, in his booth. A Belgian with a calm, reassuring voice and clever blue eyes, Philippe opened a children’s bookstore in a small Belgian city in the mid-1970s. Selling books to parents turned out to be not enough for him. He wanted to intervene, create, and finally publish the books that he placed on his shelves. By the late 1970s Clavis Publishing was making a name for itself in the children’s book industry. Talking with him was more fun, exciting, and easier than I ever expected. Surprisingly, my picture book resonated with some of Philippe’s other book projects and his own life experiences.  

Working for years in the history of radiation protection and the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), I had come across a captivating story. In the early 1960s, the United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower donated two mobile laboratories to the IAEA. The Agency was established in 1957, at the suggestion of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace program, which aimed to control nuclear energy and its industrial exploitation on a global scale. The first director of the IAEA, US congressman Sterling Cole, used the two mobile laboratories to train scientists around the world in the use of radioisotopes and radiation protection methods. The two mobile laboratories were sent to more than thirty countries as part of one of the largest technical assistance projects of the IAEA. 

Photographs of that time paint a picture of the economic inequality on the planet and the global hope for peace and prosperity. Historians of science Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Diáz have explored at length the use of one of the mobile radioisotope labs in Latin America and the IAEA’s colonial understanding of development. Loukas Freris has focused on the meaning of the second mobile lab for the development of nuclear research in Greece in the 1960s. I have unearthed the details concerning the construction of the two mobile laboratories and the US’s strategic and diplomatic gesture to gift these to the IAEA. Together with Freris, we see the mobile labs as the early crowns of the IAEA’s technical assistance programs, turned into “diplomatic bags” to facilitate their transfer throughout the globe. [5]

While looking through the archives of the IAEA, I came across amazing photographic material that documented the Agency’s efforts to promote the use of radioisotopes. Development had different meanings to nations that received and used the labs. Overwhelmed by the material, I struggled to imagine how an academic book could convey the richness of the story. 

              

FIGURE 3

Following Korean custom, students took off their shoes upon entering the mobile radioisotope laboratory that visited  the Republic of Korea in March 1961. 

Image source: IAEA Archives 

An academic monograph could not. Thus, I decided to turn to the fantasy world and produce a children’s book with a simple idea. Science on a Trip illustrates how knowledge—especially about radiation and radioisotopes—has traditionally travelled in a world in transition. The journey was never easy, nor without consequences for those who embraced it. But it always came with hope. The book narrates a true trip around the world, but what travels is something unexpected: a scientific laboratory in a bus-like mobile structure. This is a surprising trip for all accounts. The mobile laboratory was an ingenious construction in the history of nuclear sciences, custom-made for a new international organization. By the end of the program, what traveled with the mobile lab was the latest knowledge in nuclear sciences. How did this happen? How were young scientists educated in handling radioisotopes and why was that important? A short history documentary concerning the IAEA’s mobile radioisotope laboratories created by Ismail Barakat and narrated by Kristina Ford, both members of my research group on nuclear history, provides some background to the story. 

FIGURE 3

The original laboratory was blue, to match the trefoil radiation sign at the time. These signs were illustrated not in the familiar shades of yellow and black, but instead blue and violet. 

Pieter De Decker, a versatile illustrator, designer, and artist based in Belgium turned my words into pictures. His illustrations are unique. They combine his playful approach to color and form with a deep knowledge of the digital world. Inspired by real images, Pieter casts the imaginary onto the real. At the end, his imagery cracks the nuclear “success story,” providing glimpses of the dreadful world of radiation contamination and disaster.   

The book is expected to appear in 2025 both in Dutch and English by Clavis Publishing. 

FIGURE 5

The front cover of Science on a Trip designed by Pieter de Decker 

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tom Van der Cruysse for editing my original text making it more approachable to young audiences, Philippe Werck for his trust, Pieter De Decker for his fantasy, and Eva Mariën for her patience. To my husband Spiros Flevaris and my kids Katerina and Nikolas Flevaris I owe my deepest acknowledgments for reading and rereading my story, commenting, and putting up with my odd desire to get into the children’s book genre.  

This publication is part of the HRP-IAEA project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No770548.)

[1] Franklin Mowry Watts (1904–1978) established the publishing company Franklin Watts, Inc., in 1942. The press was sold to Grolier in 1957. Watts retired in 1967 and two years later moved to London to start Franklin Watts Ltd. In 1976 Watts retired again. Who's Who in Commerce and Industry, vol. 14 (Marquis Who's Who, 1965), p. 1386

[2] Bologna. Fifty years of Children's Books from all Over the World. 2013. Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

[3] Vitalij Gorjaev was Russia’s celebrated graphic illustrator and cartoonist who worked for “Krokodil, Moscow’s sardonic magazine of humor-plus-propaganda” as Time Magazine reported in 1958. He was among the first Soviet intellectuals to visit the US in 1958. The Press: Russians in Wall Street, Time. June 9, 1958.

[4] Data are available from 23 countries. See figure, p. 11. The Global Publishing Industry in 2022. WIPO https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-1064-2023-2-en-the-global-publishing-industry-in-2022.pdf

[5] Mateos, G., and Suárez-Diáz, E. (2015b). Radioisótopos itinerantes en América Latina: Una historia de ciencia por tierra y por mar. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Mateos, G., and Suárez-Diáz, E. (2019). Technical Assistance in Movement: Nuclear Knowledge Crosses Latina American Borders. In J. Krige, ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 345–367. Rentetzi, M. (2021). With Strings Attached: Gift-Giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US Foreign Policy. Endeavour, 45; Loukas Freris, “A Science Diplomacy Story: The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mobile Radioisotope Laboratory in Greece” (Master Thesis, National Technical University of Athens, 2018), retrieved from https://pergamos.lib.uoa.gr/uoa/dl/frontend/el/browse/2820365. Rentetzi, Maria and Freris, Loukas. “How to Turn a Mobile Laboratory into a Diplomatic Bag: International Relations, the IAEA and Nuclear Diplomacy” History and Technology (in press).

There are New Ways to Donate to HSS!

We have now added options to donate to HSS through a workplace giving program or monthly recurring donations. 

Monthly recurring Donations:

On select funds you can now make a monthly recurring donation if you donate online. If you want to give larger donations to HSS but it is difficult to give all at once this is a great way to break it down into smaller donations over time. When you select this option your card will automatically be charged each month until you choose to opt out of those charges or when your card expires. 

Workplace Giving:

We also have to set up our workplace giving profile through  American Online Giving Foundation/Benevity and YourCause. If your employer has a workplace giving program you can have donations deducted from your paycheck. This is a great way to maximize your giving if you work somewhere that provides a company match for donations. If your employer has a workplace giving program and they use either of these platforms you can give to HSS directly through your workplace. If you choose to give this way you may need the HSS tax ID: 52-6050324.

Thank you for your continued support!

Alex Spiecker

Development Coordinator

Professor Frank W. Stahnisch (AMF/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (26th September, 2024) for his outstanding performance in a specific area of professional activity (Medical Education) directly or indirectly related to the field of medicine (History of Medicine), including his organization of the nation-wide annual History of Medicine Days Conferences for 17 years at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. 

Johns Hopkins University Press has just released a book by Edward B. (“Ted”) Davis, Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era. For more information, see https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12468/protestant-modernist-pamphlets 

Kenneth L. Taylor, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oklahoma, was presented the Vladimir V. Tikhomirov History of Geology Award for 2024. Established in 2012 by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the Tikhomirov Medal is awarded once every four years by the International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences (INHIGEO). 

Stephen P. Weldon of the University of Oklahoma has won the Council for Secular Humanism's Morris D. Forkosch Award for the Best Book of 2021: The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism (Johns Hopkins University Press). The Forkosch Awards, established by the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, honor the finest humanist writing. (The awards for 2021 through 2023 were delayed until July 2024, owing to the death in 2021 of Free Inquiry's longtime editor Tom Flynn.) Professor Weldon, the History of Science Society Bibliographer, is currently Chair of Oklahoma's Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Princeton University Press published Andreas Daum's (SUNY Buffalo) Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography (trans. Robert Savage) in October 2024. His article on "Humboldtian Science and Humboldt's science" came out in the journal History of Science. 

Patrick McCray was chosen by the Library of Congress to be the 2025-2026 Kluge Chair in Technology and Society. He also received a Catalyst Award from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). The CIFAR funds will be shared with Drs. Matt Shindell (NASM) and Adrian Howkins (University of Bristol) to start a new project. 

Tiffany Nichols, JD, PhD, was recently elected as the Vice Chair of the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society. Her term starts in 2025. 

Gregory Radick has been elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London and awarded the 2025 J.B.S. Haldane Lecture by the Genetics Society. 

50 Years UN Basic Space Science Initiative: https://universeexplorer.org/

The website shows efforts in education, teaching, and research implemented in the period from 1974 to 2024 in the fields of astronomy, physics, and mathematics/statistics, particularly focusing on the so-called solar neutrino problem and the Michelson experiment Potsdam 1881. The efforts were pursued also in ESA/NASA/ JAXA workshops on basic space science organized under the umbrella of the United Nations for the benefit of 193 Member States. 

Deborah J. Warner, long a curator in physical sciences at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, retired in October or 2024. Peggy A. Kidwell, long a curator in the mathematics (and occasionally computer) collections, retired at the end of 2024. 

Peder Anker’s new book, For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering, is now available from Anthem Press. 

Jim Endersby’s most recent book, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology's imaginary futures, 1900-1935, is now available from University of Chicago Press. He has also been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a new project, "Darwinian Fans: reading, responding to and reimagining evolution". 

HSS member Andrew Fiss published "The Half-Burned Collegiate Algebra: College Cultures and Chance Preservation" in The Mathematical Intelligencer (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-024-10344-3). Inspired by a half-burned mathematics textbook in the Hamilton College Archives, the article reassessed the expected college cultures of math students through arguing for connections between the content of the textbook, the statements of a college president, and unsanctioned student actions. The article was part of the "Years Ago" feature edited by Jemma Lorenat. 

Humans: A Monstrous History by the commercial nonfiction author, speaker, and historian of science Surekha Davies, author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, is out from the University of California Press on February 4. The book is a powerful and provocative history of humanity’s long relationship with monsters. From ancient gods to AI, from zombies to werewolves, Humans: A Monstrous History explores how we’ve created, classified, and identified monstrous beings throughout the ages. Blending science, history, and pop culture, it tells the strange and compelling story of how our relationship with monsters has shaped the origins of the modern world and created race, gender, and nations along the way. The book is a prism through which to parse out hidden assumptions about nature and society at large. In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making to chart a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.

For ordering information, advance praise, and upcoming virtual and in-person book events, please visit: https://www.surekhadavies.org/humans-a-monstrous-history  

Mark Grossman has just published "Stirring the Pot: Antoine Baumé, Josiah Wedgwood, Pierre-Louis Guinand, and the Development of Optical Glass," a research article appearing in Ambix, vol. 71, no. 4 (2024), pp. 432–456, https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2024.2419312. 

Where’s the Chicken?

William C. Summers

Yale University (Retired)

As I reflect on the recent Annual Meeting of the HSS held in Mérida, although it was a beautiful venue, superbly organized, and an opportunity to see many old friends and hear interesting talks, two events stand out as particularly relevant to the future of HSS as it moves into its second century: chicken pie, and the tribute to John Heilbron.  Both reference the aspect of “science” in the History of “Science” Society. My professional identity is as a scientist; I have a long-standing interest in the history of science as an amateur (in the traditional sense of loving a subject) and have attended the HSS meetings, published books and articles on history of science, and taught history of science (as well as science) at a reasonably well-regarded university. My first HSS meeting was in Cincinnati in the 1980s, and there I met John Heilbron, whose lecture was the only one I really understood. He talked about the history of knowledge of the physical world of atomism. The history of knowledge. As a scientist, I could relate to that… knowledge of the material world was my business, and John knew as much about it as I did; he spoke my language. Years later I knew him as a friend and colleague at Yale.

By chance I had just started a teaching collaboration with my colleague, the eminent historian Larry Holmes, and he encouraged me to learn a bit of the craft and thinking of historians. Still, my focus was on “knowledge.” Most scientists think of “knowledge” as the object of their day-to-day work.  Since the 1980s, approaching half-a-century, I have attended the HSS meetings and watched the participation of scientist-historians dwindle, and the focus on “knowledge” almost disappear from the program. Occasionally, when I meet a scientific colleague attending the HSS meeting for the first time, the reaction is: “What are they talking about? Where is the science?” I explain, and I believe, that the “knowledge” of the scientist is indeed embedded in cultural and social contexts, worthy of study. What, however, I cannot explain is how a historian who cannot read key scientific papers with scientific understanding, can really study the cultural and social roles in which that knowledge is entangled. Debates about the best way to study the structure of the atom cannot be understood only in terms of “race, class, and gender” of the various contending scientists. Surely, the technical details of atomic physics have some role in the history of such a debate and are relevant to the historian. 

And all this brings me to the topic of chicken à la Mérida. Jane Maienschein was very appropriately awarded the Sarton Medal, the highest honor of the HSS, and in her acceptance remarks mentioned the drift of the HSS away from a focus on scientific knowledge (aka “intellectual history”) toward a more socio-cultural realm of history. She paraphrased George Sarton, one of the HSS founders whom her award memorializes, who expressed a similar concern even as long ago as 1918, that “one needs chicken to make chicken pie.” The absence of science in our scholarship belies the very name of the organization. Science (scientia) is knowledge, public knowledge, as noted by John Ziman; without the inclusion of the intellectual stuff, history of science risks becoming the history of social systems… study scientists, labor unions, or ant colonies, take your pick, all the same.

As the HSS moves into its second century, its history and imagined future was the subject of a plenary round table at the Mérida meeting. While some of the more difficult periods of the Society’s history were omitted or overlooked, such as the “divorces” from the philosophers of science and the historians of technology in the 1950s, and the “science wars” of the 1990s, the increasing inclusion and diversity of the HSS purview in several other aspects were noted. Non-Western topics, expansion beyond the “hard sciences,” inclusion of more early career scholars, and the full role of women scholars in the HSS, and globalization of the annual meeting venues were welcome markers of progress. As if to channel Maienschein’s comment about chicken pie, however, several of the panelists almost gleefully recounted the Society’s success in wresting the HSS from the grip of the scientists who had founded the organization. Indeed, self-identified scientists with an interest, or indeed, some expertise in historical scholarship, were few and far between at the Mérida meeting; the few I met were mostly there for the Heilbron memorial. The world population of scientists is (at least) a hundred-fold greater than that of the historians of science. What a missed opportunity for mutual support, interesting collaborations, better historically-informed teaching of science, and institutional and financial support for the historical enterprise! Recall Ian Hacking’s phrase, “The Social Construction of What?” What we need is more chicken. Take a scientist to lunch soon… maybe even invite her to the next HSS meeting. 

Editorial Note: The views expressed below are solely those of the author. We welcome HSS members to submit their own views on the state of the profession for the next issue of the HSS Newsletter.

Paul Atreides at HSS

By Darryl E. Brock, Wenzhou-Kean University

Mérida! Just arrived, I sank into one of the Hotel Fiesta Americana’s comfortable couches, aware of the seemingly bejeweled stained-glass artifact five stories above me, a behemoth resplendently filtering the fierce Yucatán sun. The HSS conference program in hand, I searched the index. Another year, another disappointment. Paul had yet to reappear. 

I well remember HSS 2016 Atlanta. There, I similarly perused the program while imbibing a whiskey sour at the Westin Peachtree Plaza’s bar. There he had appeared, just below the famed Garland Allen, one inimitable Paul Atreides. That was my first surprise in Atlanta. Another revelation soon welcomed me during that day’s lunch. 

As I sat at a table, a friendly older fellow thrust his hand at me. He announced, “I’m Gar Allen.” Originally a biologist myself, I sat there transfixed, stunned to be in the presence of one of my discipline’s luminaries. Trying to hide my astonishment, I enthusiastically seized his hand, introducing myself. This kind gentleman-scientist then engaged me in discourse as if I were the most fascinating person he had ever met. In fact, he invited me to that year’s History of Biology Seminar at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Deferring to demands of my new professorship at CUNY, I did not attend. That will always be one of my life’s great regrets.

Later that day, I again reflected on Paul Atreides at HSS. Impossible! But was it? A combined service military officer named Mr. Data once spoke of a kerr loop from superstring material when similarly and unexpectedly encountering the call letters NCC-1701-C. OK, maybe that was the how of it, but why HSS? Surely AAAS would be the place to seek experts on temporal mechanics. But, of course, Paul’s very presence obviated that. In fact, he could have appealed to think tanks such as the Bene Tleilax for such technologies. Something else compelled Paul to visit HSS—and to choose that specific year.

That Paul Atreides chose to register at HSS under his family name implied a possible explanation. He had avoided his moniker associated with the kangaroo mouse (Muad’Dib). Of course, that choice would have evinced Paul’s interest in biology. He obviously knew this mouse could survive on metabolic water.  Further, Paul demonstrated great interest in large desert annelid worms. He particularly focused on their spice-like exudate. Still, HSS did not represent a venue for biological science, per se. Paul sought something else. Perhaps new alliances required better understanding regarding “weapons of the weak.” That is, how could indigenous people resist powerful imperial colonizers, those who embraced “machines as the measure of men?” This might be anathema to teachings of his Orange Catholic Bible but Paul stood ready for anything, even a jihad.

HSS thus made sense, but which panel (or panels) had Paul come to consult? Projit Mukharji’s roundtable on “Post-Western Histories of Science in South Asia” represented a possibility. Its tracing of medical technologies and capitalism in relation to modernization stood ready to be replicated in potential futures. Another possibility included Peder Anker’s “Human Ecology as an Interdisciplinary Approach to Social and Environmental Crisis.” That panel’s notions anticipated many points that would later be raised by the imperial ecologist Liet-Kynes. It might behoove HSS to query Mukharji and Anker for recollections of unusual attendees. In particular, did anyone ask questions of desert versus ocean ecologies, perhaps enigmatically referencing the little-known locale of Caladan?

One might speculate or one might seek evidence. The obvious focus for the facts of Paul Atreides’ appearance at HSS resides in then society coordinator Greg Macklem who would have handled the Atreides registration. In fact, back in 2016 I had asked Greg about Paul and he did admit to responsibility for the program. More recently, I revisited this with Greg. With a Mona Lisa hint of a smile, he reiterated his involvement with Paul Atreides that year but ventured no additional information. On the surface, this might seem to imply a bit of chicanery, even a subtle deception for mere amusement. It seems to me that that is exactly what Greg would hope to imply. I suspect the reality is a bit more sobering. If Stilgar’s Fremin could so readily launch a jihad, dispatching an HSS society coordinator would be but a trifling matter. I don’t blame Greg’s circumspection regarding the 2016 conference.

Upon further reflection, I have realized my entire approach to solving this unexpected appearance misses the obvious. Paul Atreides did not come for any panel. He visited HSS 2016 because it represented a way to seek historical, enlightened biological information while yet remaining under the radar. The editor for the Journal of the History of Biology might be approached at HSS without those who monitor science contacts readily noticing. Paul stood at a moment of decision. Could the sandworms’ outputs be maximized? Could they be transplanted beyond their local ecologies? His prescience seemed to fail him on these points. He decided to avoid consulting contemporaneous experts for such knowledge; if exposed, this could imperil his actions against an empire. None of the Great Houses would imagine his consultation in the past of Garland Allen, an unparalleled biologist who yet might be quietly located at a “mere” historical conference. 

Alas, I not only missed a great moment of historical insight by not attending Gar’s Seminar at Woods Hole that year, but if I had mentioned Frank Herbert to him, perhaps he would have shared something else even a bit more intriguing. After all, as an ardent social justice advocate who marched with MLK, Garland might indeed have found great appeal in Paul’s anti-imperial project.

Interview With Jane Maienschein

What drew you to the history of science? What about the history of biology specifically? What keeps you engaged with it?

I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and my high school taught the Harvard Project Physics, which was designed by Gerald Holton and Jim Rutherford and was very historical. That was my first introduction. I figured out that history of science was a real field when I was an undergrad at Yale studying with Martin Klein and Larry Holmes. Biology came later. I love the history of biology because biologists are really open and interested in history of science. 

Reflecting on your time in the field, how has the history and philosophy of biology changed? What new directions and perspectives do you find most exciting now? Why?

So many changes. From debates about whether “internalist and externalist” approaches are right and true, to introductions of science as a social construction, to acceptance of more diversity of many sorts in the field, which is a good thing. Though I wish we would be more accepting and learn from each other rather than demanding that our particular way is the only and right way. I especially like the opportunities to work at the intersections of sciences and history/philosophy of science, taking the science seriously.

Next, I have a few questions related to the relationship between the history and philosophy of science and the production of science. You have a long history of collaborating with biologists and life scientists as well as publishing in the history and philosophy of those sciences. In your career, how have you viewed the relationship between the history of science and the production of science within universities? In what ways has that relationship been productive for you or not? How has collaboration and contact with scientists informed your work?

Yes, I value the combination of history, philosophy, and science in my work. When I went to Indiana University for my PhD, they asked whether I planned to minor (IU required a minor) in history or philosophy. I said biology. The HPS department pushed back, but my advisor Fred Churchill agreed. Then a number of other students also chose to minor in science. That led to collaborations because John Beatty and I organized a series with biologists and HPS folks to discuss new works, like E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology.

The openness to studying science, with scientists, also led me to my first NSF grant to visit the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (a wonderful place to work!). Over the years, Garland Allen, John Beatty, and I have built a very integrated HPS program with summer seminars, exhibits, workshops, and various collaborative projects including one in neuroscience between Kat Maxson Jones and MBL neuroscientists. This has become part of a larger project funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation (https://mcdonnellinitiativeatmbl.com/), co-led by Kate MacCord, which has brought together scientists with historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science including Elihu Gerson. Many biologists “get” that history matters. I have argued and given examples where becoming clear about the history has actually improved and even transformed the science by challenging cherished assumptions, for example. 

In the history of science, technology, and medicine, many take degrees in the sciences that they later critically study, or similarly do graduate-level research (in physics or medicine, for instance) in addition to working on the history of those practices/sciences. Many historians of science, technology, or medicine are also appointed in schools of information, medical schools, and so on. You are appointed in a school of the life sciences. How do you understand the role of technical knowledge in doing the history and philosophy of science? What challenges and opportunities has your institutional location presented? Is the future of the history of science in history of science departments, or in schools and departments of the disciplines that we write the histories of? What is the critical role of people trained in the humanistic interpretation of the sciences?

My favorite George Sarton quote is this: “The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence.”  ["The Teaching of the History of Science," The Scientific Monthly 7 (1918), 193-211] Understanding and examining science is essential and a great foundation on which to build. My PhD studies led me into the lab at IU and also to the MBL, reproducing historical experiments to understand the assumptions scientists like Thomas Hunt Morgan were making when they did their developmental studies. Exposing these assumptions also illuminated why choices were made, with examples of how limitations or opportunities emerged as a result of those choices. 

There are some historians and some philosophers of science who say about those of us working with science and scientists, “oh, that’s not real history.” Some historians have adopted the mantra that science is bad or has done bad things in the world. Yes, bad actors have used scientific knowledge at times to do bad things, but it isn’t the science that is bad. HIstorians of science can study science, with scientists, in science departments and many other places, while also questioning what work is being done, by whom, how, and for what purpose.  

Those trained in humanistic fields who are able to converse with the science, and scientists, can help interpret in different ways than those who stand outside science. There is room for us all in the HSS. 

HSS is a professional society that is meant to define, expand, and maintain the health of our work as professional historians of science. Universities today are facing an uncertain future. How has HSS in this respect changed over the course of your career? How have you seen universities change as institutions where knowledge is produced and distributed?

Of course, all institutions change. Evolution and adaptation to changing conditions can lead to robust results and stronger societies. Universities have provided places for many historians of science, but George Sarton himself would have noted that they are not always welcoming and not always aware of the opportunities available. The tendency to want to protect what we have rather than also envision what could be is limiting. The HSS can help provide a home for historians of science wherever they are and whatever they are doing. Some outstanding historians of science are independent scholars finding their own paths; some are independent contractors; some are editors at presses or with publications of many sorts; some work in government and policy; others in industry, and so on. A healthy society like HSS can welcome them all and provide them a place to work and learn together. HSS’s efforts with online events and welcoming younger scholars and those from diverse backgrounds are promising ways to open the doors and stimulate exchange of ideas and experiences. 

You have also worked in policy. Could you tell us a little bit about your work as a science advisor in Washington D.C.? Many historians of science want to make a public impact and use our work to contribute to justice-related projects. What would you want other historians of science to know about trying to play a positive role in shifting political ideas about science?

What a great opportunity!  Our congressman was assigned to the House Science Committee. He said “yikes, I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese but I was an English major. I need a science advisor.” ASU’s president asked me to step in, and I became a Congressional Fellow.  I was able to make a difference in more traditional and more surprising ways, mostly by being willing to explore opportunities and take on roles that many rational people at the time thought were kind of crazy. Working in the policy world means having to write a lot and do a lot of work that does not have your name on it. It means working with people you don’t really like or respect very much. It means doing a lot of listening and learning. That’s hard for many academics, who are primed to value work for which they want credit.  

There are many ways to have an impact. Look at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science): their Science and Technology Policy Fellows Program welcomes historians; Betty Smocovitis and I are both on their Board now, and Holden Thorpe as the editor of Science is especially interested in historical topics and questions. It’s possible to have an impact as Naomi Oreskes does at the highest levels, testifying at Congressional hearings. But it’s also possible to have impact and enjoyable experiences working with NGOs and serving on committees and panels. If invited, say yes. Listen and learn.  

You've been very successful in securing funding from the federal government and other foundations to support work in the history of science. Reflecting on your career, how would you characterize our current funding climate for scientific research and research in the history of science? How important is this type of work (grant writing and federal support) to the health of our field?

Thanks to excellent leadership of the NSF Science and Technology Studies  Program over the years (it used to be the Science, Technology and Society Program, and earlier, the History and Philosophy of Science Program), a lot of history of science work has received NSF funding. ACLS, NEH, NIH, and many foundations have supported the kind of work we do. I think the opportunities are great now, but we could work harder to help younger scholars know how to find the niches and to be willing to take risks to try things that may not seem obvious. Collaborating as the historian on a larger project is a good way to get funding for your work, for example. With declining support for the humanities, connecting with scientists can create new opportunities. Learning to apply for funding and to communicate the importance of the work being done are both critical. HSS could do with more training for how to seek grant funding, and for developing writing and communication skills. The 3MT (3 Minute Thesis) competition approach would be a fun way to support younger scholars learning to talk about their work.

In introductory seminars to science studies and the history of science, students learn about historical debates and flashpoints in our discipline. Thinking about the "science wars" or debates about "internalism" and "externalism," how do you view these moments in the history of our discipline now? What lessons do you think they could teach students today? How do these events inform how you conduct your research and work?

Polarization doesn’t help. Building up antagonisms of “us” and “them” doesn’t help. Having healthy disagreements and coming together to discuss those is valuable. I’m sorry that some of the past attacks on “the hegemony of science” have provided support for some who want to tear down science and argue for “alternative facts.” It’s important to think about the broader implications and impacts of our work to best inform reflective thinking. For example, especially with a diverse student group, it is naive to assume that everybody will share your values and think eugenics is bad or that medical advances are good. Learn to listen and really hear what others are saying and what values underpin their thinking. Such understanding effectively improves teaching and also promotes one’s own learning and community building. 

What advice would you give to someone early in their career entering our field today?

Two things: Please be true to yourself. Don’t let others dictate what you should value, how you should teach, or what you should do. Be informed, but be yourself. 

And be opportunistic (in the best sense). If a door opens, walk through and explore. 

Note from the Executive Office

Anxiety builds as you view a wildfire off in the distance. For me, it was a mere eight miles away—far enough to remain physically safe, yet close enough to feel the gravity of the situation. Then, the lights went out. Eighteen hours later, when power was restored, the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles had destroyed large swaths of the city, displacing countless individuals, including some of our own members.

This was not how I envisioned starting the New Year—or this newsletter. But this crisis has weighed heavily on my mind, leaving little room to focus on anything else. Amid this tumult, however, came an unexpected and deeply moving silver lining: an outpouring of support and concern from HSS members. Many of you reached out to check on my family’s safety, offering words of comfort and assistance. It was in these moments that I realized, after 3.5 years, just how deeply I am a part of this remarkable community—a community that not only shares a passion for the history of science but also genuinely cares for each other.

This is the essence of HSS. It is not just about advancing scholarship or convening at the Annual Meeting, it is about fostering a global network of individuals united by shared values. We are connected by more than our research; we are connected by our humanity. This strength was evident during the Centennial celebration in Mérida, Mexico, where we came together to honor our shared history. Despite the heat of the Yucatán, spirits soared as we explored the vibrant sights and sounds of our host city. The joy was palpable at the banquet and in the packed house for the opening plenary and Distinguished Lecture.

Moments like these remind us of what makes this community so special: our resilience, our solidarity, and our shared commitment to the work we do and the bonds we build. Whether navigating the challenges of natural disasters, personal hardships, or political strife, we come together to support one another and advance our collective mission. It takes tremendous care and kindness to ensure everything runs smoothly—and this community delivers time and again.

As we move forward into 2025, let us carry this spirit of solidarity with us. I look forward to reconnecting with all of you in New Orleans this November. Until then, please know that my door—or inbox—is always open. Feel free to reach out anytime at jp@hssonline.org.

Together, we can weather any storm and continue to thrive as a community dedicated to the history of science and to one another.

Celebrating 100 Years as an Organization: Your Support Matters!

Join us in celebrating our 100th anniversary and help build a stronger community!

The History of Science Society could not reach this important milestone without the participation of our members. We are proud to have you as part of our community for this amazing milestone. You, and all of our members, help make HSS a community where all historians of science can feel welcome. As we look toward the future it is essential that we remember what makes HSS special, and continue to build a community that is welcoming to all.

A large part of our HSS community is built through our annual meeting. It serves as a valuable resource to all members, but is even more essential to young scholars who are new to the field. The annual meeting provides great opportunities for young scholars to network, present their work, and attend the presentations of more established historians of science. Despite these opportunities many young scholars opt not to attend due to the expense of travel, food and registration.

You can support their success, and encourage their growth as young historians of science. Donate to our Centennial Fund today. Help make our events accessible to all scholars regardless of their financial circumstances. If you have any questions please reach out to me at my email address, alex@hssonline.org. Thank you for your continued support and belief in our cause.

Warm regards,

Alex Spiecker

Development Coordinator

IsisCB Newsletter

By Judy Kaplan

Transactions of the IsisCB has been going strong since March. As reported in the last newsletter of the Society, the goal of this new experimental publication is to open up the CB to as many interested users as possible. The bi-weekly digest alternates between issues that share recent additions to the CB and those that are more thematic in nature. 

Over the summer, we used Transactions to launch a new dissertation initiative, which you can read about here. To name some other highlights, we have also put together a bibliographic companion to Osiris 39, Disability and the History of Science; provided a tutorial on how to search across the cumulative bibliographies and the CB Explore; conducted interviews with editorial staff and developers; and examined key topics in the field, e.g. Textbooks. 

At the end of the day, the fundamental idea here is that bibliography is social. We encourage you to subscribe, talk back, and to start making the most of this valuable research tool

Kluge Event Summary

By Matt Shindell, HSS Secretary

On July 26, 2024, the History of Science Society partnered with the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress to host the one-day workshop, “Experts, Politics, and Power: Scientific Narratives, Past and Present.” The event took place under the auspices of the HSS Centennial and was held in the Montpellier Room of the Library of Congress’s Madison Building.

The day included three roundtable discussions around the themes of regulation, communication, and advocacy. Each roundtable consisted of three speakers and a moderator. “Regulate,” moderated by W. Patrick McCray and consisting of Yulia Frumer, Rocío Gomez, and Alex Wellerstein, considered the relationship between science and regulation, using examples drawn from the introduction of new technologies such as nanotechnology; affect-sensitive robotics and AI; tools for environmental health and monitoring; and processes for the control of scientific and technological secrets. 

“Communicate,” moderated by M. Susan Lindee and consisting of Jamie Cohen-Cole, Adrianna Link, and Will Thomas, considered the shifting history of models of science literacy, science communication, and public policy and outreach, and suggested how understanding of this history can facilitate more effective ways of drawing on science to sustain a civil society. 

“Advocate,” moderated by Amy Slaton and consisting of Adam Biggs, Karin Rosemblatt, and Jaipreet Virdi, considered advocacy inside and outside of science, including the experiences of practitioners of science and medicine pushing for change within their communities; the use of science by experts and laypersons in social movements; the interplay of social factors and politics in shaping scientific expertise and policymaking; as well as how historians of science have engaged in advocacy.

In addition to the roundtable discussions, HSS President Evelynn Hammonds delivered a keynote address assessing the past 100 years of the history of science. HSS editors Alix Hui and Matt Lavine presented the Centennial issue of the journal Isis and reflected on what they’ve learned about the HSS and its history during their editorship.

Member News

Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity (Chicago University Press, 2023), by Massimo Mazzotti, has been awarded the 2023 Book Prize by the American Association for Italian Studies. 

Andrew J. Hogan, Professor of History at Creighton University, recently received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (#2418246, $209,769) to support his project, "Health Professions Education Strategies for Broadening Participation in Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy."

Christine Y. L. Luk has just published a new research article titled “The Chinese Freshwater Jellyfish Unbound: Evolution, Nomenclature, and Bioinvasion of Craspedacusta sowerbii, 1880–1941” in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, vol. 54, no. 4 (2024), pp. 493-520. 

Roberta L. Millstein (University of California Davis) has a new book out:

The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, published with University of Chicago Press. The book is available as a free open access download at this link: https://bibliopen.org/9780226834474

Hard copies of the book can be purchased at a 30% discount with the code UCPNEW at this link: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo219284936.html

Book Abstract: Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields.

Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy. 

History and Education of the Albert A. Michelson Exhibition Developed at the Occasion of the Einstein Centenary Berlin 1979 and the Michelson Colloquium Potsdam 1981

The paper is dedicated to the 200th Anniversary of the oldest astronomical journal, Astronomische Nachrichten, founded by H. C. Schumacher in 1821 and the150th Anniversary of the establishment of the Astrophysikalisches Observatorium Potsdam (AOP) on 1st July 1874.

History and Education of the Albert A. Michelson Exhibition Developed at the Occasion of the Einstein Centenary Berlin 1979 and the Michelson Colloquium Potsdam 1981* (scirp.org)

Michelson’s technical invention of his interferometer and his performance of the first experiment with the interferometer was a milestone in the history of physics. This paper reviews the history of the Michelson experiment, invented, and performed for the first time at the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam in 1881. The paper draws attention to the International Michelson Colloquium, held from April 27 to April 30, 1981, in Potsdam (Germany). This paper is an attempt to reconsider a scientific event organized more than 40 years ago, as the follow-up to Einstein’s Centenary, celebrated from 28 February to 2 March 1979 in Berlin (Germany), for Michelson’s experiment done more than 140 years ago. Issues in history, education, and research still pursued today with reference to Michelson’s experiment are highlighted. For the first time letters from Max Born and Helen Dukas to be of interest for the relation of Einstein and Michelson is part of this paper.

Agustí Nieto-Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) recently published a new book: The Land of the Hunger Artists (Cambridge University Press). For details about the book, follow this link:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/land-of-the-hunger-artists/EA72C6645DF9639401D8FAA75D0FD274 

Raffaele Pisano, already Full Professor at the Lille University (France), has now been awarded ''1st Class'' University Rank as well. He has recently worked on two books which are now available from Springer:

R. Pisano, J. Dhombres, P. Radelet de Grave, P. Bussotti, Homage to Evangelista Torricelli’s Opera Geometrica 1644–2024: Text, Transcription, Commentaries and Selected Essays as New Historical Insights, Springer (2024). https://link.springer.com/book/9783031069628

R. Pisano (ed), A History of Physics: Phenomena, Ideas and Mechanisms. Springer (2024). https://link.springer.com/book/9783031261732

Ronald E. Mickens published a new article with Chaemayne E. Patterson:  "The Lady in the Photo: Chrystine Ramsey Shack's Involvement in Project Matterhorn," History and Philosophy of Physics (Forum of the American Physical Society), vol. XV , no. 5 (Fall 2023) , pp. 1, 7-9. 

A Festschrift in honor of John Krige, put together and introduced by Jahnavi Phalkey, has been published as a special double issue of the journal History and Technology, vol. 40, issues 1-2 (2024), "Hegemony, Co-Production and the American Empire: Essays in Honor of John Krige." 

Beginning January 2025, Anita Guerrini will be the editor-in-chief of Notes and Records, the Royal Society Journal for the History of Science. She takes the place of Anna Marie Roos. 

Martina Kölbl-Ebert received the 2024 Sue Tyler Friedman Medal, awarded by the Geological Society of London for work on the history of geology.

Edward Beasley's book A Male Hysteria: Diabetes and the Victorian Mind was published by the American Philosophical Society Press. (It is available through the University of Pennsylvania Press website.) The book examines how in the UK in the second half of the nineteenth century diabetes mellitus came to be thought of as a psychological disease, and the effects of this mindset on medical research and the lives of patients. 

The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy AIHP awards Alain Touwaide the prestigious George Urdang Medal to recognize his lifetime achievements as a person who, over a sustained period, has made important scholarly contributions to the field of the history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals. His publications address varied topics spanning many centuries and they exhibit great breadth and depth. In many ways, his long and productive career highlights and mirrors the humanistic aspirations for pharmacy history put forward 80 years ago.

As per the press release of the AIHP (Sept. 1, 2023), “Over a long and globe-trotting career Dr. Touwaide has researched the history of ancient science, particularly botany, medicinal plants, medicine and therapeutics in the Mediterranean World from archaic Greece to the Ottoman Empire. In 2007, he co-founded the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions. He is a past recipient of the AIHP's Edward Kremers Award. The Urdang Medal is a testament to Dr. Touwaide's dedication and passion for preserving the legacy of pharmacy history ... The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy congratulates Dr. Alain Touwaide for his remarkable achievement and for setting an exemplary standard for pharmacy historians and scholars worldwide.”

The award honors Professor George Urdang (1882–1960), a pioneering historian of pharmacy in Germany and the United States, and AIHP’s founding Director.

The photo shows Alain Touwaide with Prof. Gregory Higby of the AIHP, who conferred the Urdang Medal during the award ceremony at the International Congress of History of Pharmacy in Belgrade, in September 2024.

The “three historians” paper described by Donald Forsdyke (Queen’s University, Canada) in the February HSS Newsletter is now available (Theory in Biosciences 143, 1-26), as is the final paper of another of the three (Mark Adams; in Delisle RG, et al. Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology: Deconstructing Darwinism. Springer, Cham, Switzerland: DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-42629-2_5). In addition, Forsdyke has the “rules” of Erwin Chargaff’s (1905-2002) in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (in press), and the blood studies of Robin Fåhraeus (1888-1968) that extend the classical studies of William Hewson (1739-1774) and others. Currently in preprint form (Qeios), the latter is of special interest in relation to recent pandemic reports of autopsies that reveal white (not red) fibrous strips within blood vessels. Eighteenth century writings note that these might assist “medico-legal inquiries as to the position of the body after death.”

'Intellectual club or labor union?': An Interview with Harun Küçük

Harun Küçük is an Associate Professor in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732, a book that explores the relationship between monetary inflation and natural knowledge in seventeenth-century Istanbul. He received his PhD in Science Studies from the University of California at San Diego.

Küçük has served as an elected member of the executive council of HSS since 2022, and will be concluding his service this year.

Interview conducted by Sam Franz.

You are an international scholar who has found a home in a US research institution. Do you have any reflections on that process? Was it your plan to work in a US university?

I think, for someone of my generation, US jobs represented the pinnacle of the profession. I was OK with remaining in Turkey or in Europe if the opportunity had presented itself, but, of course, it is extremely rare to find the equivalent to an Ivy League position anywhere else in the world. And, honestly, the job market back when I got this job was bad enough that anyone of my generation would have taken any stable job – somewhat like but also somewhat better than how things are now. I was extremely lucky to end up at Penn. Since I was trained in the US, the adjustment was not difficult. And having had a little taste of how things are elsewhere, I'd say US positions tend to be a lot more stressful and also socially challenging. You are always in competition. I think collaboration is more in the foreground in Europe and in Turkey. Then again, individual rewards are also greater in the US.

How did you choose the history of science as a field? How has the field changed your academic interests over the years? From your perspective, how has the history of science (and the History of Science Society) changed over the course of your career?

I wanted to be a philosopher in college and Alexis de Tocqueville during my MA, but it was really Bob Westman who turned me into a historian of science. UC San Diego's Science Studies program was extremely formative and really introduced me to the intellectual breadth of the discipline, past and present. "Historian of science" is a badge I wear very proudly because I find that it's a discipline that really stands up to tough intellectual challenges. The people in the field are smart. I feel smart whenever I read a good history of science book or attend a good annual meeting. 

History of science, once an umbrella discipline, now occupies third place in the general landscape and may rank a little below technology and medicine in terms of popularity. I have noticed that science proper is less and less prominent even in HSS. History of medicine has a strong showing at the annual meeting, as does history of technology. History of the physical and the exact sciences, once defining features of the discipline itself, now teeters on extinction. Then there is the history of knowledge, which is on the rise, especially in Europe.

However, I also sense an existential threat to the history of science – and some colleagues in the field are saying as much – because science no longer has its former rigidity. People don't even speak of science anymore. They say STEM. And STEM, of course, has a pecking order, where science and math are at the bottom as instrumental fields while practical fields of engineering and technology really define the meaning and direction of STEM. Science is now less brick and more mortar.

You are about to finish your role as an HSS council member. What did you learn serving as an elected member of our professional society?

I think I have learned what the history of science looks like once you evacuate its intellectual content. Much like administrative roles in universities, council membership shows you all the material and bureaucratic infrastructure that makes a field possible in the first place. It gives you enormous perspective. And since history of science pursues reflexivity, what may otherwise be seen as a boring administrative gathering gives you insight about your research. 

You are on the editorial board for History of Science and Journal for the History of Knowledge. You have also taken various institutional administrative roles at the University of Pennsylvania, within HSS, and beyond. How has your service in these roles to our field impacted or changed your perspective on your work? How do you view your work in these roles? What does it mean to be a member of what you have called the "load-bearing generation" in the history of science at this moment?

I think you get exposed to a lot of what is genuinely political and genuinely economic about the production of science. I mean, sure, everything is a little bit political and a little bit economic, but then there is political and economic as such, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the intellectual content. It was a useful distinction to make for myself.

With the pandemic or right around then, much of the senior leadership of the discipline hit the eject button, often for very good reasons. I have heard one senior colleague say, "it's not fun anymore." We still haven't started thinking in detail about what the pandemic has done to the history of science, to all of us, and the consequences may not become clear for a few more years. I found myself, like many others in my age group, occupying positions that we associated with people we looked up to. I'm 43 and I think I am closer to the top than to the bottom of the age range at the annual meeting. I don't yet know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I try to do my best in my limited capacity. 

HSS is a professional society that is meant to define, expand, and maintain the health of our work as professional historians of science. Universities today are facing an uncertain future. What can HSS do to ensure that historians of science maintain their important and expanding role in universities across the world? What about beyond the university?

I personally think there are two possible routes: intellectual club or labor union. The current state of the universities and of the job market really put a dent in the notion of "professionalism." We are now professionals – and act accordingly – yet the profession itself is fading. So, that's the parable: what does it mean to be a professional without a profession? What is to be done if most fellow historians of science can't find jobs or don't have $2k to spend on the annual meeting and primarily need help with those things? Professionalism suddenly goes from being a mechanism of inclusion to being a mechanism of exclusion. 

How will we confront a world where humanities research is not valued, even hypocritically, for its own sake? We can either become public intellectuals or teachers. An individual can do both, but I don't see how a society can prioritize both. I admire my colleagues who write for a broad public, but disdain feeling the compulsion to write for the public. I think societies like HSS exist so that we can shut the door and have a high level, mutually interesting conversation among ourselves. And, our primary goal should be to keep that room. In the long term, our collective salvation lies in making a strong intellectual case – not one driven by marketplace dynamics inside and outside the university – for how important the history of science is at the pedagogical level. As long as universities remain our primary workplaces, I think teaching is a more secure route forward. So, I'd like to see our society function more as a union for people who teach the history of science. We are already doing union-type activities, like mentorship for early career scholars. We can add advocacy and statistics-gathering to the list and, with the help of an proactive leadership, we can possibly make life better for fellow historians of science. And besides, teaching history of science is how all this started almost a century ago. We can start there and hopefully build ourselves back up.

You participated in a podcast with Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Helen Tilley on global perspectives in the history of science for the HSS centennial. You said there that one of the perspectives you find most exciting in the field is "materialist understandings of the history of science" – this appears connected to your most recent work on the history of scientific labor and capital. Could you expand on what you mean by this and where you see this perspective going?

I think understanding scientists and scholars as economic actors, not just while they are on the job, but throughout their lives, has a potential to reveal motivation at the individual and the collective level. I don’t think material circumstances have been entirely absent. We talk about funding and we talk about materiality. But somehow we always dodge the economic specificities, the economic subjectivities and so on. When we do come around to talking about it, it’s sterile, it’s numbers, it’s the way the economists or the budget office talks about money. But money is both sticky and intimate, yes, also for science. I mean, look, even our own predicament as historians of science has a sticky and intimate relationship with the money invested or not invested in the field in ways we don’t really approach openly and analytically. The boss doesn’t want you to talk about money, but since when has history of science been about pleasing the boss? 

I think material inequalities also emerge quite starkly for those of us who identify with the global turn. To me, it’s clear that we have used culture way too much and at the expense of other useful analytic frameworks when we analyze variation over time and space. I think a global approach can really help us address many conundrums that we may not be able to resolve at the local level. We all need a fairly broad sense of the past and of other places to see whether what we are analyzing is normal, exceptional or exceptional normal. 

What advice would you give to an early career scholar entering the field of the history of science today?

I think if you hear the proverbial calling, you absolutely need to answer it. That being said, you need to beat worsening odds in order to become a permanently employed historian of science. None of us really control the structural forces, but you should never let these forces destroy your sense of self-worth. I have seen a lot of people who lose self-esteem when they are not successful during an application season. I think it’s useful to anchor your self-esteem in less hostile and more dependable things than the job market.  You don’t go into this line of work for the depression and the resentment. As for smaller advice, I’d probably add that you shouldn’t feel compelled to put yourself out there until you are ready to own the profile that you project. 

Are there any intellectual debates or concepts in the past that you feel have been forgotten, ones that you think could intervene in current debates in the field today?

I think Marx needs to come back. We need more people who know more about Marx and think with Marx. You don't need to be Marxist, but you lose something when you act like the man never existed. When you look back at the first issue of Science in Context, you get a sense of what scholars used to think context meant. I also think you can't go very far in fruitfully analyzing current parameters of inequality – race, gender, ecology and so forth – without seriously confronting the economic inequalities. You know, Marxist truck drivers used to go into this line of work. That's how much radical potential the history of science had and in my view still has.

Recommended Reading for Mérida

Isis editors and members of the History of Science and Knowledge in Latin America Forum collected these articles for HSS members to review prior to our annual meeting in Mérida.

Clara Sue Kidwell, “Native Knowledge in the Americas,” Osiris 1985:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/368646

Julia Rodriguez, “Between Prejudice and Pride,” Isis December 2013:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/674947

Helen Anne Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science, and Mexican Maize,” Isis March 2021:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/713819

Mackenzie Cooley, “The Giant Remains: Mesoamerican Natural History, Medicine, and Cycles of Empire,” Isis March 2021:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/713593

Gabriela Soto Laveaga, “Worker Once Known,” Isis December 2023:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/727760

Angélica Márquez-Osuna; Beekeeping from the South: The Yucatán Peninsula's “Industrious Bee” and the Rise of Modern Apiculture. Agricultural History 1 February 2024; 98 (1): 23–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-10910295

Paula López Caballero; Domesticating Social Taxonomies: Local and National Identifications as Seen Through Susan Drucker's Anthropological Fieldwork in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1957–1963. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 May 2020; 100 (2): 285–321. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-8178222

Vera S. Candiani (2017). Reframing knowledge in colonization: Plebeians and municipalities in the environmental expertise of the Spanish Atlantic. History of Science, 55(2), 234-252. https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317706041

Gisela Mateos & Edna Suárez-Díaz (2015) ‘We are not a rich country to waste our resources on expensive toys’: Mexico’s version of Atoms for Peace, History and Technology, 31:3, 243-258, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1128166

García-Deister, V., & López-Beltrán, C. (2015). País de gordos/país de muertos: Obesity, death and nation in biomedical and forensic genetics in Mexico. Social Studies of Science, 45(6), 797-815. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715608449

Alexandra Minna Stern; “The Hour of Eugenics” in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 August 2011; 91 (3): 431–443. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-1300191

Miruna Achim, “From Rustics to Savants: Indigenous Materia Medica in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42, no. 3 (2011): 275–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.03.002.

New HSS Membership Tiers

Renewal season officially starts on 1 October 2024 and HSS membership tiers have changed. Council voted to revise our member dues structure in November 2023 and the new structure is as follows, with income-based in US dollars:

When you are ready to renew for 2025, log in to your Member Profile and select Renew Now. Select your member type - Individual, Student, or Retired. Next, select the appropriate tier. After checkout, you’re all set for another year of HSS membership! 

As always, renewal is also possible via a paper form and check mailed to our P.O. Box. If you’d like a printable form or if you have any questions, please contact Morgan Valenzuela at morgan@hssonline.org. Thank you for being a member of HSS.

Note from Executive Office

As we enter a new member term, we enter into the dues structure for 2025 set forth by Council in 2023. These changes were designed by the Committee on Membership (CoM) to create more equitable tiers and ensure that HSS remains a vibrant, inclusive society that supports all its members, regardless of financial status.

Why We Updated the Dues Structure

Our previous dues system, while effective for many years, needed to evolve to better serve our members. The CoM, chaired by Gabriela Soto Laveaga, reviewed feedback from surveys and individual conversations, examined other scholarly societies' due structures, calculated a threshold for a total cost of participating in HSS (so it was average or below the average of other societies), and concluded that a more flexible, income-based approach would allow members to contribute at a level that reflects their current circumstances. This new model aligns with our commitment to equity, inclusivity, and accessibility, particularly as economic disparities have widened globally.

Our goal was to create a structure that supports the society’s financial health while making sure no member is excluded because of financial hardship.

The New Tiers

We’ve introduced income-based tiers to better accommodate our members’ varying financial situations. The new structure is as follows (all dues in US Dollars):

• $0-$25,000
  Dues: $25

• $25,000- $50,000
  Dues: $35

• $50,000 - $75,000
  Dues: $65

• $75,000 - $100,000
  Dues: $125

• $100,000 - $150,000
  Dues: $175

• $150,000 - $200,000
  Dues: $250

• $200,000 and above
  Dues: $300

How to Renew

Here’s a simple guide to help you through the process:

1. Log in to the HSS Membership Portal

  Visit our website and log in with your credentials. If you’ve forgotten your password, simply follow the prompts to reset it.

2. Select a Member Type

  Select from either Individual, Retired, or Student.

3. Select Your Tier

Based on your current income, select the appropriate tier for your dues in the drop down list. Note that there is an option with a member type and “(Do not use),” this is a remnant of the old system. Please do not select this. It exists because there are members who are in this category whose expiration goes beyond 2024. This option will disappear once all members migrate to a new tier.

Why Your Membership Matters

Your membership is essential to the strength and sustainability of the History of Science Society. It supports our annual meetings, publications, and the overall infrastructure that allows us to remain the leading voice in the history of science. More importantly, it ensures that we can continue to provide a welcoming, inclusive space for our members.

Thank you for being an integral part of HSS. Should you have any questions about your membership or the renewal process, feel free to contact  Morgan Valenzuela, Manager of Members Services at morgan@hssonline.org.

Update Your HSS Member Profile

Is your HSS Member Profile up-to-date? Here’s how to change your email address, affiliation, and mailing address, or add a profile picture. First, sign in to your member profile. Click on the My Profile Tab. 

Click the About Tab. Here you can edit all three aspects of your HSS Member Profile:  Professional Information, Personal Information, and Additional Information. 

Would you like to receive printed versions of Isis and/or Osiris? Or cancel your existing print journal deliveries? Scroll down to the Additional Information section to make that edit. 

If you have selected to receive journals in print, be sure to add a mailing address in either the Personal Information or Professional Information sections. Click the blue Edit button beside either of these sections to add or update your mailing address for journal deliveries. 

You can leave your address visible to other HSS members or set aspects of your address to private. To hide a component, click on the red silhouette icon beside each address component and select “Private (Not Visible in Profile)”. All components are automatically set as visible to other members signed into their accounts.

To update your profile picture, click back to the My Profile tab. Hover over the profile picture icon or existing photo and click on the Edit option that appears. 

Choose your new photo from your files and click Open to update your profile. 

Celebrating 100 Years as an Organization: Your Support Matters!

Join us in celebrating our 100th anniversary and help build a stronger community!

The History of Science Society could not reach this important milestone without the participation of our members. We are proud to have you as part of our community for this amazing milestone. You, and all of our members, help make HSS a community where all historians of science can feel welcome. As we look toward the future it is essential that we remember what makes HSS special, and continue to build a community that is welcoming to all. 

A large part of our HSS community is built through our annual meeting. It serves as a valuable resource to all members, but is even more essential to young scholars who are new to the field. The annual meeting provides great opportunities for young scholars to network, present their work, and attend the presentations of more established historians of science. Despite these opportunities many young scholars opt not to attend due to the expense of travel, food and registration. 

You can support their success, and encourage their growth as young historians of science. Donate to our Centennial Fund today. Help make our events accessible to all scholars regardless of their financial circumstances. 

If you have any questions please reach out to me at my email address, alex@hssonline.org. Thank you for your continued support and belief in our cause.

Warm regards,

Alex Spiecker
Development Coordinator

The 2024 meeting of the Lone Star Historians of Science was a rather grander affair than those of past years. Hosted by Luis Campos and Liz Petrick of Rice University and Jacob Moses of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, with help from Pratik Chakrabarti and Alexey Golubev of the University of Houston, it was spread over two days and two cities. It started at Rice in Houston on Friday, April 26, with a round of “lightning talks” by the more than twenty participants, followed by a buffet dinner. After a drive to Galveston and a stay at the Hotel Lucine along the city’s seawall, the group gathered the next morning at UTMB’s beautiful “Open Gates” conference center (the former Sealy family mansion, built in 1891 and designed by the architect Stanford White) for an illuminating presentation by Blake Earle of Texas A&M–Galveston. Blake traced the growth of commercial fishing, mainly for shrimp and crabs, in the bays and estuaries of coastal Texas in the early 20th century and its complex interaction with the emerging petroleum industry in the region. He then examined how environmental concerns and xenophobia came together in the late 1970s to spark deadly conflicts between local fishermen and newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants. After lively discussion, members of the group settled down to enjoy boxed lunches, pose for the customary Lone Star photo, and then begin the trek home. 

Each spring, the Lone Star Group brings together historians of science, technology, the environment, and medicine from around Texas to discuss their shared interests and enjoy a friendly meal or two. Its constitution, adopted at an Austin restaurant in 1988, provides that there shall be “no officers, no by-laws, and no dues,” and the group remains resolutely informal. Anyone wishing to be added to the group’s mailing list (and that’s all it takes to become a member in good standing) should contact Bruce Hunt of the University of Texas at bjhunt@austin.utexas.edu.

Photo caption:

Front row: Liz Petrick, Rebecca Falkoff, Elizabeth Bishop, Jesse Ritner, Pratik Chakrabarti, Megan Raby, Jacob Moses, Miriam Rich, Rodolfo John Alaniz, Karl Stephan, Muthuvel Deivendran

Back row: Luis Campos, Blake Earle, Katie Truax, Randal Hall, Eric Williams, Bruce Hunt, Dmitrii Blyshko, Daniella McCahey, Raymond Hyser, Pam Stephan

Member News

Anthony N. Stranges has a new book, Petroleum from Coal: a Century of Synthesis (Brill: Leiden, Boston, 2024, xii, 408 pp). Petroleum from Coal shows why and how Friedrich Bergius, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch invented and developed synthetic fuel processes in 1913-26; explains why and how Matthias Pier at BASF- IG Farben and Otto Roelen at Ruhrchemie successfully industrialized fuel syntheses during the Nazi-World War II years; and analyzes the pre- and post-World War II vicissitudes of the synthetic fuel industry. The research of Germany’s scientists in the 1920s-40s made them world leaders in synthetic fuel studies. Information on the synthetic fuel processes has come from the Allied teams who went to Germany and Japan during World War II’s closing months and from British, American, and Canadian synthetic fuel investigations.

Edwin Rose shares news of the upcoming Natural History in the Age of Revolutions (1776-1848) conference. Location is the Linnean Society of London Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BF, United Kingdom, taking place on Monday, July 15 from 9am to 7pm (GMT+1). Ticket sales end 13 July 2024. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/natural-history-in-the-age-of-revolutions-1776-1848-tickets-887543826477?aff=oddtdtcreator

William Summers recently published Magic Bullets, Miracle Drugs, and Microbiologists: A History of the Microbiome and Metagenomics, ASM/Wiley, May 2024.

World Scientific recently published The Reinvention of Science by Bernard Jones, Vicent Martinez, and Virginia Trimble, the last of whom received the 2024 Abraham Pais Prize in History of Physics from the American Physical Society.

The British Society for the History of Mathematics 2023 Neumann Prize winner is Stephen M. Stigler for his book Casanova's Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2022; 243 pp., ISBN: 9780226820798, paperback $22.50.

Scott Gilbert will be coming out with a new book on evolutionary biology this September. Published by Princeton University Press, and co-authored with Kevin Lala, Tobias Uller, Marcus Feldman, and Nathalie Feiner, Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity looks at the importance of developmental mechanisms for understanding all aspects of evolution. For more information and reviews, see https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691262413/evolution-evolving.

After a decade's work, Robert Bud's book Applied Science: Knowledge, Modernity, and the British Public Realm has been published by Cambridge University Press and was launched at the Science Museum on May 22, 2024.

Maura Flannery’s book, In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants, received the 2024 Excellence in Botany Award from the Council of Botanical and Horticultural Libraries. 

Adrienne Mayor wrote about the history of observations of animals that self-medicate for The Conversation, May 2024:

https://theconversation.com/animals-self-medicate-with-plants-behavior-people-have-observed-and-emulated-for-millennia-229768

Adrienne has recently been interviewed extensively for radio, television and print media. For The Economist's Babbage Podcast in February, she spoke about the Vesuvius-burned papyri recently deciphered by artificial intelligence. She also spoke about dinosaur fossil legends for a Colorado Public Radio/NPR story, forthcoming fall 2024. In January 2024, another interview about Prometheus with Colin McEnroe aired on Connecticut PBS/WNPR. Adrienne’s interview about ancient Amazons and the documentary based on her book "The Amazons" aired on France 5 Television, May 2024. In April 2024, National Geographic published her interview on ancient theriacs and antidotes. 

Jan Golinski has received the Distinguished Professor Award of the University of New Hampshire for 2024. This university-wide award recognizes a career of distinguished teaching and service to the university and the profession, and a substantial record of scholarly achievement. 

Hans J. Haubold

In the May 2024 HSS Newsletter Hans announced the production of a website showing education, teaching, and research pursued in the past 50 years focusing on Michelson 1881/1981, solar neutrinos, and 20 UN/ESA/NASA/JAXA workshops around the world. 

This website is now live at:

https://universeexplorer.org/

The website is showing efforts in education, teaching, and research implemented in the period of time from 1974 to 2024 (50 years) in the fields of astronomy, physics, and mathematics/statistics, particularly focusing on the so-called solar neutrino problem and the Michelson experiment Potsdam 1881. The efforts were pursued also in ESA/NASA/JAXA workshops on basic space science organized under the umbrella of the United Nations for the benefit of 193 Member States.

Hans requests that HSS Newsletter readers contact him to suggest publications by other authors that have equally good connections with, or illuminating commentary on, the issues told in this website.

Marieke Hendriksen, senior researcher at the Huygens Institute and NL-Lab of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, has been awarded a 2 million Euro Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her research project ‘PRESERVARE: Large-scale conservation of perishable foodstuffs in the Low Countries, 1600-1800.’ The project analyses how not only scientific knowledge but also practical, everyday knowledge, as developed in households and businesses, played a role in the development of food conservation techniques. As this knowledge was often not formally recorded, research is challenging. Through an innovative combination of historical data analysis of diverse sources, reconstruction of historical techniques and analyses of archaeological finds, this project maps these undescribed processes for the first time.Particular attention is paid to the diverse groups of people who played a role in the development of conservation techniques. The project thus aims to show how embodied, unconscious knowledge developed not separately from, but in conjunction with more formal, written knowledge. 

The project will start in September 2024 and last for five years. The ERC grant will enable the appointment of a team of two PhD students, a postdoc, a data manager and a number of practice experts.

Marieke Hendriksen is co-head of the Department of Knowledge and Art Practices at the Huygens Institute and interim head of research of NL-Lab. She specialises in the role of material culture and sensory perception in knowledge production in the early modern period (1600-1800). In early 2024, she  Het Grote Dropboek, on the history of liquorice in the Netherlands.

Anita Guerrini gave the 2024 Hagströmer lecture at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on 7 May 2024 on “Foreign Bodies: Humans, Animals, and Vaccine Development.” 

Gregory Radick will speak about his recent book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology as part of the Presidential Symposium at the 2024 annual conference of the American Society of Human Genetics, taking place in Denver in November.

Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey has been awarded the Infosys Prize 2023 in Humanities. Read the full announcement here: https://www.infosysprize.org/laureates/2023/jahnavi-phalkey.html. 

Roland Boucher presented a demonstration and a PowerPoint presentation at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the AAAS-Pacific Division.

Martina Kölbl-Ebert is the 2024 recipient of the Geological Society of London's Sue Tyler Friedman Medal for distinguished contributions to History of Geoscience.

The “three historians” paper described by Donald Forsdyke (Queen’s University) in the February HSS Newsletter is now available (Theory in Biosciences 143(1), 1-26). Sadly, in the interim, Mark Boyer Adams died (May 9, 2024). He had been nominated for the Sarton Medal in 2023. His final paper will be available later this year (“The evolution of ‘Darwinism’: up close and personal.” In: Delisle RG, Esposito M, Ceccarelli D (eds.), Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology: Deconstructing Darwinism. Springer, Cham, Switzerland).  

Ariel Segal (Library of Congress) published a paper on the digitization of the Library of Congress's Hebrew manuscripts, and presented it together with his co-author, Hana Beckerle (Library of Congress), at the recent Society for Imaging Science and Technology Archiving Conference.

Citation: Ariel Segal, Hana Beckerle, "Digitizing the Library of Congress Hebrew Manuscripts Collection" in Archiving Conference, 2024, pp 33 - 38, https://doi.org/10.2352/issn.2168-3204.2024.21.1.7

The paper/presentation was also the subject of a University of Maryland College of Information Studies article:

https://ischool.umd.edu/news/library-of-congress-digitizes-rare-hebrew-manuscripts-opening-centuries-of-jewish-history-to-the-world/  

Sabbatical Year Book: "La historia de la ciencia y la tecnología como parte de la formación ética en ingeniería". In Repositorio Institucional, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2023. 

Journal article: EL LEGADO DE JOHN HENRY NEWMAN PARA ABORDAR LA CRISIS ÉTICA EN UN CONTEXTO DE PANDEMIAS. In Revista de Bioética Latinoamericana, Vol. 28, N° 1, pp. 15-38. 

Journal article: EL PAPEL DE LA DIMENSIÓN HEROICA EN LA HISTORIA DE

LA CIENCIA Y LA TECNOLOGÍA PARA LA CONSOLIDACIÓN

DE LA CONCIENCIA ÉTICA. In Boletim da AIA-CTS, N° 20, March 2024, pp. 28-36. 

Jonathan Topham’s book Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Bestsellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2022) won the 2023 academic book prize of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Whitfield book prize of the Royal Historical Society (London).

The ISSR prize citation reads: "There is a strong tradition of historical research on science and religion, but Jonathan Topham’s Reading the Book of Nature is a really outstanding contribution. It is meticulously researched, providing a rich array of fascinating new information. Topham documents the close relationship that existed between science and religion in the period of the Bridgewater Treatises, in which the religious significance attached to scientific research made science respectable in the public mind. It shows yet again that the notion that there is necessarily a conflict between science and religion is historically unsustainable. Topham’s book will make an enduring contribution to our understanding of the intellectual climate of pre-Victorian Britain." 

Claire Isabel Webb and Lois Rosson invite you to read “Empire of the Dandelion,” a speculative fiction piece in the form of an Isis journal article from the year 2169: https://futurehistories.berggruen.org/empire-of-the-dandelion. The story is a part of the Future Histories of Life, Otherwise, a collection of five creative works that mangle the logics of traditional history writing. Read the whole collection at https://futurehistories.berggruen.org/. 

Robert (Bob) Olby (1933–2020)

Written collectively by Rachel A. Ankeny, Jon Hodge, and Jim Lennox, drawing on their own memories, as well as published materials, obituaries, and material provided by his family.

Robert Cecil Olby was born in Beckenham, England (part of the historic county of Kent) on October 4, 1933 to Cecil A. and Nesta M. (Paul) Olby. He studied biochemistry as an undergraduate at the University College London: he later recollected a 1953 lecture about Frederick Sanger's success in producing the first sequence of the units of a protein, insulin, with no mention of DNA. He graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Science and worked as a biology teacher, then enrolled at Oxford University, describing himself at that time as “very inexperienced and ill-educated.” The Australian historian of science A.C. Crombie who was his PhD supervisor had recently established the history of science as a graduate level offering at Oxford. During this period, Bob also was exposed to talks by prominent historians and philosophers of science including Georges Canguilhem, N.R. Hanson, Alexandre Koyré, and Owsei Temkin. Bob graduated in 1962 with a PhD thesis entitled “Mendel's Precursors and Contemporaries in Genetics” which served as the basis for his classic book, The Origins of Mendelism (1966). Bob married E. Judith S. Potter in the same year, and together they had five children, Alastair, Louise, Natasha, Fleur, and Peter. As his family notes in his obituary, he lived a life of curiosity, hard work, and joy, and taught his children that they could do anything in life. He loved gardening, and was a talented musician with a flair for the great romantics, a wonderful artist, and an avid birdwatcher. He was always active, walking or cycling miles every day, and thinking and talking.

Bob’s earliest books included the first edition of his The Origins of Mendelism (Constable, 1966), a short biography of Charles Darwin (Oxford University Press, 1967), and several books on European scientists (Pergamon Press, 1966–67). In 1969, he started work at the University of Leeds, where he remained until 1992. During that time, he produced The Path to the Double Helix (1974, discussed in more detail below) and a second edition of his Mendelism book (University of Chicago Press, 1985) which included considerably expanded extracts from relevant primary sources and a new final chapter on the rediscovery of Mendel, in which he explicitly rejects the dated positivistic approaches to history which were common when the first edition was published, describing his adoption of “a constructivist view in which knowledge is seen as underdetermined by the facts, their meaning being dependent, to an important extent, upon the theoretical presuppositions of the observer” (p. xiv). This change to his methodological approach can also be seen in other publications during this period such as the essay “Mendel No Mendelian?” (History of Science 17: 53–72, 1979). Bob was a keen and enthusiastic teacher at Leeds, often taking on new classes well beyond his core expertise, such as the History and Philosophy of Psychology and Psychiatry course (in collaboration with Leeds colleagues from psychology and philosophy). He was active in the British Society for the History of Science, serving on its Council in the mid-1980s, and its treasurer in the late 1980s.

A measure of Olby’s growing international prominence and authority, particularly in the field of history of molecular biology, can be seen in two short articles written for the 1990 Routledge volume of over a thousand pages entitled Companion to the History of Modern Science. This important collection was initially envisioned by Bob who became its prime mover, and was edited together with three of his Leeds HPS colleagues, offering critical analyses and syntheses on key topics in the history of science. Although Bob’s own contributions are relatively short in length, their pages contain evidence of the evolution of his thinking and methods, and his continued pursuit of scientifically rigorous yet historically grounded narratives. The first explores the emergence of the new science of genetics over half a century from the 1860s to the 1910s, while the other investigates the molecular revolution in biology between the 1930s and the 1960s. What is so impressive about both articles is that they synthesize scientific and more historical approaches to history, as well as drawing on accounts from the sociology and philosophy of science. 

Bob took compulsory retirement from Leeds in 1993, and moved to the United States to take up a Mellon Research Fellowship to pursue research at the Rockefeller University in New York to work on his next major monograph, an intellectual biography of Francis Crick, where he also spent time in the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg’s lab. The resulting 2009 book, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets (authored with assistance from Martin Packer, and published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press) was conceptualized and produced over a very long time period. Arguably it began with Olby’s discussions with Crick at Oxford University in 1966, when Crick had become angered upon reading Jim Watson’s draft manuscript submitted to Harvard University Press of what would become his 1968 bestseller, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. It has been reported that Crick (as well as Maurice Wilkins, the other biologist who shared the 1962 Nobel award for the decipherment of DNA structure with Crick and Watson) thought the book to be so misleading that they threatened to sue the press if they did not reject it, which they duly did. However, Watson took it to another publisher (Atheneum), and it became a classic perhaps not in the history of science, but in the genre of highly fictionalized, first-hand scientific accounts, not least of all due to his neglect to attribute credit to Rosalind Franklin in relation to the ‘discovery’ of the structure of DNA. (Olby also provided an earlier contribution to addressing this absence in the existing historical accounts by writing the entry on Franklin for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles C. Gillespie and published 1970-80 by Scribner, predating important longer publications on Franklin and her contributions by Anne Sayre in 1987 and Brenda Maddox in 2002.) 

Crick viewed Olby as a scholarly and fair-minded historian who could provide a corrective alternative to Watson’s book, which indeed was one key strand within Olby’s Path to the Double Helix (Macmillan, 1974; University of Washington Press, 1975; reissued by Dover, 1994). Crick wrote the forward for the original edition, which is evidence of the high esteem in which he held Bob and his scholarship. Later Crick collaborated with Bob on his own biography, which was especially impressive given that Crick was notoriously difficult to please. 

In 1994, Bob received the Marc-Auguste Pictet Medal from the Société de physique et d’histoire naturelle de Genève, which is awarded to a scholar who is recognized as an authority in the history of science. But clearly his teaching and research days were far from over: to bastardize a phrase that he used about Watson in a book review, he was “too young [solely] for gardening” (Nature 426: 229–230, 2003). During his research year at the Rockefeller in 1993–4, Bob was offered and accepted a position as Research Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. This opportunity provided him with new colleagues, students, and experiences. At Pitt from 1994–99, he taught or co-taught a number of graduate and undergraduate courses, including History and Philosophy of Medicine, co-taught with Rachel A. Ankeny, for which he insisted on not only including the traditional sources in more internalist history of medicine but also drew on continental approaches and work from the philosophy and sociology of medicine. He also contributed and oversaw a core course in the History of Science. He served on 8 doctoral dissertation committees on topics in the history and philosophy of molecular biology, the neurosciences, and beyond. These dissertations included Ankeny on the nematode C. elegans as a key model organism for molecular biology, Carl Craver on neural mechanisms, Alan Love on evolutionary innovation and novelty, Jonathan Simon on pharmacy and the chemical revolution, Jim Tabery on causation in the nature and nurture debate, and David Rudge on selection experiments in evolutionary biology, evidence to Bob’s versatility and abilities to bring interdisciplinary sensibility to topics in the history and philosophy of science.

Bob also published several papers during this period based on his research in the history of biology and neuroscience, and gave presentations at diverse conferences. He particularly enjoyed hearing new graduate students present research in his fields of specialization, always actively and generously engaging them in conversation and giving feedback on topics ranging from how to do oral histories with elite informants to how to balance details of the science with engaging narrative. Even after retiring from Pitt in 1999, he returned regularly as a guest instructor in graduate seminars in the history of science. He also continued to develop a more reflective approach on the history of molecular biology, for instance in his 2003 article for Nature on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, entitled “Quiet Debut for the Double Helix” (Nature 421: 402–405, 2003) in which he stressed the “muted” and “lukewarm” reception of the initial proposal until mechanisms for DNA replication and protein synthesis became available. While at Pitt, Bob continued work on his intellectual biography of Crick (which was finally published in 2009), including numerous visits to La Jolla, California, to interview him. 

During his time working at Pitt, Bob lived near the campus in Bloomfield in an eccentric dwelling known affectionately by all as the ‘dollhouse.’ Its slanted walls and floors, and extremely low ceilings, only added to the charm that Bob himself exuded in his gracious hospitality to colleagues and visitors. After retiring, Bob and his partner Ann Ruth moved to the Pittsburgh suburb of Churchill so that Bob would have more room for one of his favorite pursuits, gardening, and where they continued to pursue their mutual love of ballroom dancing. 

Bob passed away on the last day of 2020 in Willow Spring, North Carolina, where he had lived since 2016 to be closer to his daughter Natasha when it became too challenging to live without support. He was extremely sad to leave his beloved Pittsburgh, but picked up a new hobby in North Carolina—table tennis!—and ultimately enjoyed this new chapter in his life. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a hybrid memorial was held belatedly at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire, England, and virtually on October 1, 2022. The family has asked that donations in his name be made to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives (give.cshl.edu) where some of his papers have been deposited (additional papers are held in the Crick Archive at the Wellcome Collection and at the American Philosophical Society Library). We all will fondly remember Bob’s kindness, his inquisitive nature, and his tireless quest for getting historical and scientific details correct. As a tribute eloquently written by the historian of biology Nathaniel Comfort noted, Bob was “a dear and gentle man who embodied the British notion of ‘Good Form.’ May he live on in our memories and our footnotes.”

New HSS Editors

On July 1, 2024, Isis was handed over to a new editorial team: Professor Projit Bihari Mukharji and Professor Elise K. Burton took on the role of co-editors, with Professor Pablo F. Gómez as the book review editor. This editorial partnership heralds multiple historic firsts for Isis in the year of the HSS centennial. For the first time, the Isis editorial office will be shared by three different institutions, and three different countries, at once: Ashoka University near Delhi, India (Mukharji); the University of Toronto, Canada (Burton); and the book review office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Gómez).

Our editorial partnership also brings leadership of Isis to Asia for the first time. We perceive this move as an important opportunity not only to attract new submissions to the journal from all parts of the world, but also to build upon HSS’s strong membership constituencies in North America and Europe. We plan to leverage the Ashoka office, as well as our team’s scholarly networks in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to promote the journal and the History of Science Society among scholars in these regions. Over the course of our tenure, we plan to organize a series of workshop events in these regions to bring small groups of local historians of science together and kick-start a conversation between them and HSS members. We will identify local institutional and individual scholarly collaborators who will help us organize these events, and invite volunteers from the existing HSS membership to participate. We expect these events to be an occasion where the editorial team and HSS delegates can engage closely with the work of historians of science based in a specific region. Instead of a short-term attempt to simply recruit one-off manuscript submissions, we hope that our approach will actually help us grow HSS membership in these regions as well. In addition to sharing and workshopping their research therefore, we will try to develop long-term, sustained social ties and incubate collaborations between HSS members and the scholars we meet, aiming to extend our community to new regions.

We plan for Isis readers at large to benefit from a more immediate outcome of these events: a new special section to appear annually in the journal that reviews the historiographical state of the field in different regions, especially those where most of the key scholarship is produced in languages other than English. Through these special sections, Isis readers, regardless of their own languages and geographies of expertise, can access snapshots of the global scholarship in the history of science and consider their own research from a multiregional perspective. We also plan to include with the special section a small sampling of translated primary sources from the region. We hope this might help Isis readers discover links between their existing research interests and local archives.

Meanwhile, our vision for the everyday functioning of Isis involves a significant degree of continuity: having witnessed the success of the co-editorship of Alix Hui and Matt Lavine, we will follow the same model of manuscript review that currently exists. While each submitted manuscript is initially assigned to one handling editor to usher through the review process, final decisions are always made jointly. Submitting authors and peer reviewers can be assured that notwithstanding the time difference between Delhi and Toronto, both editors will consider their work and discuss decisions through weekly Zoom meetings and other online communication. Additionally, we will gladly continue the tradition Alix and Matt have established of being visible and accessible in-person at HSS conferences, especially to junior scholars seeking to learn about the submission and review process. In the first instance, at the Mérida meeting we will participate in a roundtable organized by the Graduate and Early Career Caucus on “demystifying the publishing process.”

Above all, we are cognizant that our journal is now over a century old and has well-established traditions and protocols of its own. As historians we plan to respect those traditions, while also recognizing that traditions must also adapt to the future. We see our job as working at the interface of these inherited traditions and responding to the challenges of an unknown future. We hope you will join, support, and tell us how to make this difficult work of calibration successful. We look forward to taking on our editorial responsibilities, not least for the opportunity it will give us to engage deeply with the vibrant scholarship of our colleagues, and to play a role in nurturing the growth of the field.

2024 Sarton Medalist: Jane Maienschein

HSS is pleased to announce the 2024 Sarton Medalist, Jane Maienschein. 

Jane Maienschein is a distinguished scholar at Arizona State University (ASU), and has earned numerous university accolades, including University Professor, Regents’ Professor, President’s Professor, Parents Association Professor, and Director of the Center for Biology and Society. At the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, she holds the rare title of Fellow.

For over forty years, Jane has been a leading figure in the history and philosophy of science. Her prolific research includes five books, 14 edited volumes, over 95 research articles, and 41 editorials and op-eds, covering topics from embryology, genetics, and evolution to regenerative medicine and public policy. Her work exemplifies rigorous historical investigations that illuminate current science and public health issues.

Jane's contributions to the history and philosophy of biology are foundational. Her first monograph, Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880-1915 (1991), analyzed the shift in American biology from descriptive to experimental methodologies. Her work has significantly influenced the field, bringing new scholars into the history of biology. She has also integrated philosophy into the history of biology, emphasizing that historical and sociological contexts are crucial in understanding scientific experiments.

Jane's early scholarship established enduring approaches to experimental and American biology histories. She emphasized the importance of experimental methods in biology and explored how historical context influences scientific acceptance. Her practice of "practical history," where she recreated historical experiments, has inspired many historians and philosophers of science.

Her extensive work includes critical studies of cell and developmental biology, bridging the gap between historical and contemporary scientific issues. Jane's second major book, Whose View of Life? (2003), examined the historical and policy aspects of embryology, providing insights into contemporary debates on reproduction and stem cell research. Her public engagement and clear communication have made complex scientific issues accessible to broader audiences.

Jane's dedication to building diverse and inclusive scholarly communities is evident in her teaching, mentorship, and administrative efforts. She has mentored numerous students and early-career scholars, many of whom have achieved significant positions in interdisciplinary institutions. Jane co-founded the Embryo Project Encyclopedia and the MBL History Project, providing valuable resources for public and academic audiences.

For 35 years, she has co-directed the History of Biology summer seminar at MBL, fostering collaboration among historians, philosophers, and scientists. Her latest initiative (co-founded and run with Kate MacCord), the McDonnell Initiative at MBL, promotes interdisciplinary research on regeneration, highlighting the importance of collaboration across disciplines.

Jane's extensive service to disciplinary societies, including her term as President of HSS and  the Board of Directors of AAAS, showcases her commitment to advancing the field. Her leadership and organizational skills have created inclusive spaces for scholarly work, making her a highly deserving recipient of the Sarton Medal.

Note from the Executive Office

Annual Meeting

In July registration and hotel reservations opened for the 2024 HSS Annual Meeting in Mérida, Mexico. We will be celebrating our centennial in Mexico with a program that looks at the last 100 years of the field and what is to come in the next 100 years. It’s not all academic, though, we’ll have a centennial banquet a short walk from the hotel to the Quinta Montes Molina. Thanks to our Program Chairs, Courtney Thompson and Christina Ramos, for putting together a program that reflects our location and the celebration of our centennial. Thanks also to our local arrangements committee, Edna Suárez-Díaz and Gisela Mateos, for putting together our banquet and excursions to sites in the Yucatan that should not be missed!

June Council Meeting

A few items of note from the June Council meeting: 

-Council voted to make the Early Career Representative a voting member of Council. In the 2025 election, all members will vote to elect this position.

-Council voted to change the name of the Committee on Diversity and Inclusion to the Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity.

-Council voted to dissolve the HSS@Work Caucus.

Council also took the first steps in strategic planning. This planning focused on four thematic categories of issues,  called “Drivers of Change,” identified as relevant to organizations like ours.  

-Changing Information Channels: New technologies and new perspectives are giving rise to new channels of information dissemination. These channels, like TikTok or gaming platforms, are shaped by audiences seeking new forms of contact and expression and transforming what it means to be a legitimate information source. 

-Rejection of Expertise: Public skepticism toward credentialed experts and institutions is growing. Expert pronouncements have reduced impact on public perception, with the public turning instead to non-credentialed and “unofficial” sources for guidance and information. At the same time, information is increasingly able to route around gatekeepers. In response, new frameworks and institutions for curbing the spread of misinformation are being developed.

-Next Generation Professionals: Millennials are now the largest generational cohort in the workforce, and Generation Z is right behind them. These next-gen professionals are the future of associations and, contrary to some conventional wisdom, they are willing to both join and stay with organizations that meet their career development needs. Organizations will need to provide the kinds of training, mentoring, content, and other services that next-gen professionals value most, encouraging engagement that leads to loyalty.

-Volunteering: Cultural, demographic, and technological changes are altering volunteer expectations and experiences in an increasingly dynamic and digital organizational environment. Associations and nonprofits are experimenting with more flexible roles and structures to support collaboration and contribution. 

Smaller groups within Council are examining these Drivers of Change and focusing their attention on how these are impacting HSS, and what we can do as a Society to address the changes. 

New Member Pricing

In November 2023 Council voted to revise our member due structure. The new structure, which goes into effect for the 2025 term (for members joining or renewing on or after  1 October 2024), is based on income in US dollars. Corresponding membership rates are listed below.  

We will no longer have the old member types (Individual, Student, Family, Retired). When it comes time to renew your membership, you will be asked a question regarding your career status. Please answer this question so we can continue to track our membership constituencies and offer relevant discounts.

Are you receiving all of the emails you’d like to receive from HSS? Select the emails you’d like to receive in your HSS member profile.

First, sign into your HSS member profile. Click on the blue My Profile button in the top menu.

Ensure that the gray Profile tab on the left side of the screen is selected. In the Account Information section, click on the embedded Manage Email Preferences link. 

A small popup window will open. Select or unselect the emails you’d like to receive from HSS. Once finished, click the blue Save Preferences button. You’re all set!

Don’t miss your opportunity to make a difference, support graduate student members!

History of Science Society relies on your support and generosity to continue providing resources for all members within our organization. At HSS we are committed to ensuring that our events are accessible to all individuals regardless of financial circumstances. 

We are raising funds for our graduate student members to attend our Annual Event. You can help us reach our goal of $10,000 to ensure all interested students are able to attend the Annual Meeting in November. Please make a gift at whatever level is within your means.

Join us today: Donate to our Graduate Student Support Fund and make our Annual Meeting accessible to all members of HSS

If you are unable to contribute today please consider donating in the future. Thank you to those who have already made a contribution this year. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions regarding how contributions will be used to further the mission of HSS.

Thank you for your continued support! 

Forum News

Early Sciences 2024 Essay Prize 

For the second year, Early Science and Medicine and the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society are joining together to run a prize competition for the best essay focusing on early science, medicine, technology, and other forms of natural knowledge across the globe before 1800. We especially welcome submissions from early career scholars. The author of the winning essay will receive a $200 award and the piece will be published as an article in Early Science and Medicine subject to peer review; the committee will provide mentorship throughout the process. The winner will be strongly encouraged to attend the 2024 History of Science Society Conference in Mérida on November 7-10, 2024 as the prize will be awarded at the Early Sciences Forum Meeting. 

We invite you to submit unpublished essays between 8,000 and 15,000 words in English that are not under consideration at another journal. Please follow the ESM style guide and make sure that your paper has been anonymized. ESM publishes images in color and black-and-white; the author will handle permissions. Please submit essays by July 1, 2024 via this form (https://forms.gle/rxxHkF49i5x5neWA8); the winner will be notified in early summer, in plenty of time to arrange for travel. For questions, please email earlysciencesforum@gmail.com.

Member News

Warwick Anderson's new book, Spectacles of Waste (Cambridge: Polity, 2024) has been published. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to fecal transplants and excremental art, our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature, and art – even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today. According to Anna Tsing (Santa Cruz): “Anderson puts the “anal” back in analysis and the “colon” back in colonialism.” Ann Laura Stoler (New School) writes: “This compelling volume is a testimony to degree to which the repugnant shapes our lives. The book is exemplary of what ethnographic history can be.” https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=spectacles-of-waste--9781509557400 

Sharrona Pearl New Book: Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.) 

Rachel A. Ankeny has been appointed as Chair and Professor of the Philosophy Group at Wageningen University commencing in July 2024. 

Jörg Matthias Determann of Virginia Commonwealth University (jmdetermann@vcu.edu) published a volume he co-edited with Shoaib Ahmed Malik. It is entitled Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion (London: I.B. Tauris, 2024). Free review copies are available from Determann and the publisher. 

Tamara Caulkins Contributed to the Women in the History of Science Sourcebook - free download, pub 2023 https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/211143 

Professor Emeritus Mitchell Ash (University of Vienna) published a monograph (in German) on the role of the Max-Planck-Society, Germany's premier research organization, in the Process of German unification, 1989-2002, with the publisher Vandenhoek & Ruprecht in August 2023. The book has been reviewed positively in major German newspapers, for example the Tagesspiegel (Berlin) and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Ash continues to publish on higher education and science policy during and following German unification. He challenges the long-held view that describes this process exclusively as a "colonization" or "takeover" of the East by West Germany, pointing out that unexpected changes in science policy resulted from unification, including serious funding cuts and institute closings in the West. 

Stephen Stigler https://www.bshm.ac.uk/neumann-prizeG

Ronald Mickens  Published two peer-reviewed mathematics papers, as well as the following article, written with Charmayne E. Patterson, which appeared in the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Physics Newsletter, Vol.XV , No.5 , Fall 2023, pps. 1, 7-9: "The Lady in the Photo - Chrystine Ramsey Shack's Involvement in Project Matterhorn." 

Richard Yeo’s recent publications:

“Thinking with Excerpts: John Locke (1632-1704) and his Notebooks”, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 43 (2020), 180-202.

“Thomas Harrison’s Arca studiorum: a search engine in an age of notebooks”. Essay review of Alberto Cevolini (ed.), Thomas Harrison. The Ark of Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017), Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 43 (2020), 295-304.

“Queries in Early Modern Science”, Intellectual History Review 32(3) (2022), pp. 553-573.

“Editorial: Towards a History of the Questionnaire”, coauthored Daniel Midena, Intellectual History Review 32(3) (2022), 503-529.

“John Locke’s Note-Taking: a very short introduction”, Studi Lockiani, 4 (2023), pp. 231-243.

“John Locke’s Note-Taking in France, 1675-1679: Between Commonplace books and Journals”, Studi Lockiani, 4 (2023), pp. 245-285. 

Hans J. Haubold 

We are working on a comprehensive website along the timeline used in

https://storage.googleapis.com/kudos-pro-assets/manually-uploaded-outputs/Haubold-1974-2024rev11.pdf

https://storage.googleapis.com/kudos-pro-assets/manually-uploaded-outputs/Haubold-AMM_HJH_1982_2012_CMSS.pdf

We are collecting information from Potsdam (Germany), Palai (India) through New York (USA) and Vienna (Austria) showing education, teaching, and research pursued in the past 50 years focusing on Michelson 1881/1981, solar neutrinos, and 20 UN/ESA/NASA/JAXA workshops around the world. 

Matt Shindell was featured in the Washington Post story on SpaceX rocket testing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/science/how-spacex-measures-its-rocket-testing-success/2024/03/20/04c18afb-89ed-43dd-bdf6-ecbbdce4ca52_video.html

Ivano Dal Prete is the recipient of the 2023 Marraro Prize for best book in Italian or Italo-American relations for his book On the Edge of Eternity. The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022) 

Raffaele Pisano, Jean Dhombres, Patricia Radelet de Grave, Paolo Bussotti (2024): Homage to Evangelista Torricelli’s Opera Geometrica 1644–2024. Text, Transcription, Commentaries and Selected Essays as New Historical Insights. Springer, Cham, 1129pp. [ISBN 978-3-031-06962-8]

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-06963-5 

Stephen M. Stigler is the 2023 winner of the Neumann Prize for his book Casanova's Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Edward Gosselin recently republished a revised edition of my Dalvings: Italy, Sex, Heresy, Astronomy, and Other Things (January, 2024). 

Seeking a New Home for History of Chemistry (and More) Books

Available is a free technical library of approximately 3000 volumes, which contains a large collection of histories and specialist monographs dealing with the history of chemistry and alchemy, as well as many biographies of famous chemists and their collected papers. Includes hundreds of 19th and 20th century monographs and textbooks in all fields of chemistry, including general, analytical, inorganic, organic, biochemistry, electrochemistry, geochemistry, and the chemistry of glass and ceramics. Many items now sell for hundreds of dollars on the internet. Also included are large sections dealing with the history of physics (again, including many 19th-century textbooks and monographs), the history of engineering and technology, the philosophy of science, the general history of science, and the popularization of science. The reason for this offer is that in 2025 the university is tearing down the building containing the office where these books are currently located. This means that most of the books are destined to be shredded. 

This offer is extended to interested individuals, college and university libraries, or used book dealers. The only requirement is that the taker arrange for and be willing to pay for the packing and shipping of the books and must take all of the books. Interested parties should contact Dr. William B. Jensen at Jensenwb.45220@gmail.com

During her selection as HSS "Sponsor-a-Scholar" (2022-2023), Yejing Ge (geyejing@mail.ustc.edu.cn) organized ten events to discuss international journal articles, attracting nearly 2,000 audiences. She introduced HSS and its official journal, Isis, to a large number of Chinese graduate students and researchers, increasing HSS's international outreach.

Technology and Culture has published Yejing Ge’s article "The Launch of a Political Satellite: Constructing the Ming Tombs Reservoir and "Mass Engineering" in Communist China." https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920519.

HSS Career Profile:

Nathan Smith, 

Museum Curator

Editors Note: Nathan was awarded the 2023 Gerjuoy/Michell Prize by the History of Science Society for the Best Abstract by an Independent Scholar at the 2023 HSS Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. Recently, Jamie Brannon discussed with Nathan aspects of his career.

Tell me a bit about your career, and how you so interestingly brought together mycology and history of science.

I think my career is one of happy accidents. I had completed my undergraduate education with a degree in Plant Sciences—having largely fallen into the subject—and a fair amount of experience writing popular science articles for the various university rags. I completed my Masters at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on fungal taxonomy and from here made a connection with Dr. Bill Amos who would go on to be my initial PhD supervisor in a project that sought to study the population genetics of Boletus edulis. 

For a number of reasons, this was not a fantastically successful relationship and I found myself in a situation that might euphemistically be described as being up the creek without a paddle. At a similar time, I found myself living in a cottage with the now Dr. Edwin Rose, where we spent more than a few nights talking—often into the early morning—on the history of science (Edwin from a history background and myself from the perspective of an engaged practitioner). These conversations led me to start writing on the history of science and particularly on my own discipline of mycology—with my first article being a conspiratorial dive as to why George Edward Massee had been so poorly treated in the histories of the subject (a rather red-string investigation of circumstantial evidence that gradually took shape into something hopefully a bit more convincing). As is often the case, the first article raised questions that led to the next and I soon found myself immersed in an area which I was deeply excited about (and also fantastically ignorant). A number of historians (most prominently Nick Jardine, Anne Secord, and Helen Anne Curry) took me under their wings (for which I’m eternally grateful) and I began to develop rapidly as a historian, finding a field and area that I felt could bring an informed perspective to and make a real impact in—a goldmine for any student. As I developed, I found that I both rather enjoyed historical research and was considerably better at it than population genetics (my second article winning the William T Stearn Essay Prize cemented this view) and fought to include it in my PhD thesis—a fight that was eventually won in part due to the COVID pandemic. 

Once I submitted my thesis, I trained as a high-school teacher for a year before taking on short contract as the Assistant Curator for Natural Sciences at Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield (a museum that, very excitingly, had been central to my historic research). From there I moved to Kew to take charge of the mycological aspect of their digitisation programme and then onwards to my current position at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales (AC-NMW). Throughout these post-PhD years in jobs with little to no research allotment, I continued in my historical investigations and shifted to primarily producing short-form articles that better suited evening and weekend work (and occasional lunch breaks).

Did you ever consider an academic career?  What convinced you that museums are your "space" in which to pursue a career?

Yes—and part of me still does. I finished my PhD during COVID and applied for both museum and academic jobs and found more success in the former. Ultimately, I feel my research background is a bit too esoteric for academia—my CV invites a lot of questions. I was often successful in getting to interviews but often found myself in the reserve position. My feeling is that most people hiring for academic jobs want a complete historian or a complete fungal geneticist—not 50% of one and 50% of the other. In museums, however, people see that as more of an advantage. There’s less money and so there really is a need to be a hyperflexible researcher to take advantage of any opportunity that crops up. So whilst I mainly conduct history research, I still conduct and support research in other areas as well.

What role has mentoring and networking played in your career?

Mentoring has played a very important role in my career and I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without it—particularly as I entered into History of Science at a point that felt rather late in my education. Prior to shifting into the History of Science halfway through my PhD, the last formal history education I had received was when I was 16 and I think my early attempts at writing history reflected that. Luckily, a number of people stepped in and stepped up to help me—there’s no way I would be in the position I am now without them. I’m fully bought into the concept of “it takes a village” to raise a researcher and try my best to support those coming up behind me. As for networking, its also helped, but to a lesser extent (I find myself a rather nervous person at conferences). That being said I think I’m getting better at it and networking is definitely helping me find “my people” in the big world that is the history of science—my latest attendance at HSS in Portland has led me to put together an upcoming special issue on the history of mycology which is quite exciting. 

A statement from a transcript of a presentation of yours says "disciplinary identity has an  important impact on an individual's practice and philosophy."  Could you expand on this?  How has this applied to your career?

Essentially, it’s the idea that how someone identifies and is trained impacts on how (and why) they conduct research. Someone trained in STS and someone else trained in History might approach a question from a different place and also reach different conclusions with the same amount of information. But more than that, I think it also affects how individuals live their day to day lives, what they expect their research to achieve, and what they think the point of their research is—I often joke that in a field such as genetics there is a high amount of competition for a small number of jobs but in mycology there is no competition for no jobs. I think this concept has applied to my career quite strongly—particularly in the periods when I had no capacity to research in my work. Mycology has a radical independent streak—something that my PhD research focused on—and it’s something that rubbed off somewhat. I don’t believe you need to belong to an institution to produce high-quality research or to define as a researcher and I try my best to embody the view of research as a hobby—one that I might be paid for at points during my career, but which is no less valid in the points in which I’m not.

How important was your choice of graduate school (Churchill College, University of Cambridge) and advisor (Nick Jardine) in helping to land the job you now have?  What advice might you have for other students considering doctoral work?

Cambridge was an excellent place to learn the History and Philosophy of Science. It has its own department and really active in organizing seminar series. In particular, the Cabinet of Natural History is a really exciting research seminar series that really formed the bedrock of initiation into the field (alongside Nick’s Ideologies of Science Graduate seminar series). It’s also a place that attracts a wide audience, including academics from other departments and non-affiliated researchers that ensures there’s always a really interesting discussion at the end. I was lucky enough to give a talk at Cabinet (my first to a history audience), and the discussion afterwards led me directly to produce one of the pieces of work I’m most proud of writing (a comparison between the cultures of cricket and mycology in Yorkshire).

On a wider point, it’s difficult not to argue that having a Cambridge background hasn’t helped me land the job I now have. It’s a real privilege and one that definitely opens doors that other universities don’t. I’m really conscious of this—and don’t think it’s particularly right—but I’m really glad of the opportunities it has provided me and try to make the most of them. 

As for my advisors, both Nick and Anne have been a constant support even in the years since I left Cambridge. They have reviewed job applications, written letters of support, and reviewed articles and talks I have written—all on a voluntary basis. Helen, who formally became my supervisor, has also been fantastic. I very much owe all of them (and many others beside) my career—particularly for the support they provided through a rather rocky PhD.

In terms of advice for other students considering doctoral work, I would encourage them to do it for the love of study and for the love of research. It was one of the most rewarding and difficult times of my life and it was only the fact that I believed in what I was doing that kept me in there during the hardest times. Perhaps more practically, I think having a good supervisor and advisory team is more important than where you study and its worth taking the time to talk to them beforehand. And finally, if you decide to do it, enjoy the doctorate. The opportunity to dedicate yourself to research and scholarship is an absolute privilege—you only get to do it once!

How do you stay active in the "scholarly conversation" in your research field?  Do you have access to a good library, and are there opportunities to attend seminars and colloquiums?

I supervise for a number of topics for the University of Cambridge and find that teaching really forces me to stay sharp and keep up-to-date on the scholarly conversation happening. In research, I think it is all too easy to fall back on favourite papers and get stuck in particular silos—but the perspectives and energy students bring to small teaching often forces me to move beyond my academic comfort zone and into areas I wouldn’t normally stray. It allows me to stay active in a number of research fields and also grants me University of Cambridge library access—which is fantastically broad. 

However, in my opinion, much more important than having access to a good library is having access to a good librarian and I’m very fortunate that at this point in my career I have access to two very good librarians: Will Beharrell at the Linnean Society and Kristine Chapman and AC-NMW. Both are absolute masters of the dark arts of inter-library loans and they’ve both been amazing in helping me track down copies of rare and obscure texts for my research (and particularly for my work on Corner). 

As for opportunities to attend seminars and colloquiums, AC-NMW is very supportive in encouraging me to attend meetings and in providing funds for me to attend. It’s great and has been the first time that I’ve had this regular support to attend academic events—which in turn has helped me feel much more connected to the community and the scholarly conversation.   

In another transcript from your presentation, you suggest that for your early 20th-century focus of research inquiry—Edred J. H. Corner—that "mycology was his 'hobby and recreation' despite being his primary academic background and engagement."  Do you feel it's important that one's "primary academic background" also serve as "hobby and recreation"?  To what extent should an historian of science love their job?

I think a historian of science has to love their job—otherwise why would you choose to do it? Looking at the crisis of history that we’re currently undergoing raises a lot of questions of how we survive as a discipline. I think pursuing the history of science as a career can be dangerous—it can cause you to chase trends and really lose what got you into research—and often leads to heartbreak. Viewing it as a hobby that you occasionally get paid for means that your identity isn’t caught up in your employment status and keeps research enjoyable. And I sincerely believe the best work is produced when you’re having fun. 

ISIS CB Newsletter

Judy Kaplan

Below is the introduction to the first issue of Transactions of the IsisCB, a bi-weekly newsletter edited by Judy Kaplan that we started on March 18. There are now four issues, which you can find at this link: https://blog.isiscb.org/newsletter/.

I am delighted to bring you a new experimental publication from the office of the IsisCB. With the end of the printed annual bibliography—the 2023 Isis Current Bibliography was the last—this bi-weekly digest is meant to keep you up to date with recent literature and emergent trends in the field.

Our goal is to recreate the newsletter-like feel of the printed Current Bibliography. Each issue will feature notable citations from our collection of recent entries, point you to themes we spot in the discipline, and highlight some of the contributors who help to make the CB possible. 

In this first issue, our purpose is to start catching up with citations that have been added to the CB since the cutoff for the last print bibliography—the period surveyed runs from the beginning of November 2023 to the end of January 2024. This helps to establish a pattern that will continue going forward: our plan is to alternate between citation-heavy issues and those that are more thematic in nature. Our next publication, for example and preview, will pick up themes in the most recent Focus section of Isis, “Magnifying Insect Histories.”

We have included some featured titles and a few observations on the main journals and topics indexed in this period below. These can be read in multiple ways: as imprints of the human hands that make up the CB; as reflections of current conversations taking place among historians of science (and friends); and as outlines of work yet to be done.

We hope these “transactions” will be useful and look forward to your feedback! Please do not hesitate to get in touch if there are topics you would like to see covered, points in need of correction, or if you would like to chime in as a guest author or editor. Send an email to isisbibliography@gmail.com.

—Judy Kaplan, Editor

__________________________________________________________________________

Featured Books

These books explore issues of relationality, non-human agency, and place taken up in “Magnifying Insect Histories.” (Note that each citation in the CB includes an abstract, links to reviews, and a list of similar citations. Featured books have all appeared within the last ten years.)

Bont, Raf de. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930. University of Chicago Press, 2015. ISBN:9780226141879.

Sarasohn, Lisa Tunick. Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. ISBN:9781421441382.

Lee, Victoria. The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan. University of Chicago Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780226812748.

Featured Article

de Ceglia, Francesco Paolo, Carla Rita Palmerino, Claudio Pogliano. “A Portolan Chart for an Expanding History of Science.” Physis: Rivista Internazionale di Storia Della Scienza LVII, no. 1 (2022): 1-16.

“One cannot navigate without some map or portolan, albeit barely sketched out,” the authors write in their introduction to this special issue of Physis. The papers that follow work toward such a sketch of the history of science from a perspective grounded in the journals of the discipline. Given this bibliographic focus, it seemed like a good title to highlight here!

Gisela Mateos (UNAM) and Edna Suárez-Díaz (UNAM), Local Arrangements Committee

In recent years, the city of Mérida has become a place with a very diverse population, attracted by its cultural, historical, and natural wealth, and because it is one of the safest cities in the hemisphere.  Mérida is the capital of the State of Yucatán, located in southeastern Mexico, where the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea meet.  In this space in which the Mesozoic was marked by the footprint of the Chicxulub meteorite, we find a rich history of the past of the Mayan culture, the presence of the colonial period, and the modern world. To all this, we add one of the most appreciated regional cuisines in Mexico: try the Cochinita Pibil, Pan de Cazón, and Relleno Negro.

Life in Mérida goes at a different pace, so we suggest you reserve enough time to enjoy the food and visit archaeological sites, nearby towns, and contemporary museums,  as well as experience some of the cenotes -underground water chambers- that are characteristic of the Yucatán Peninsula.

To get to Mérida there are several options: there are direct flights from Atlanta and Miami, and several cities in the United States and Canada offer flights to Cancun, from which you can take a bus to Mérida (approx. 3:30 hrs.) or the recently built Mayan Train (2:30 hrs.), which is expected to be fully functional in the next few months. From Europe, there are direct flights to Cancun from Madrid and Frankfurt. There are many connections to Mérida and Cancun via Mexico City, but this option is the least recommended given the complicated logistics of the capital's airport; in case you cannot avoid it, we recommend a long connection. If you have a choice, it is preferable to travel to a city in Europe or the United States from which to fly directly to Mérida or Cancun.

Mérida’s International Airport 

https://www.asur.com.mx/merida-aerolineas-links-tours

Cancun´s International Airport

https://airportcun.com/

Maya Train

https://trenmayaa.com/

Bus Cancun International Airport-Centro de Mérida (ADO Airport, $60 USD):

https://www.ado.com.mx/viajes/ciudad-cancun-qr-a-ciudad-merida-yuc/

Places to eat (comida y cena)

Museo de la Gastronomía

https://mugy.com.mx/

Casa Cuba-La Bodeguita del Centro

Calle 62 x 51 y 53 #443 Col. Centro, Mérida, Yucatán,

A variety of good local options at Paseo 60:

https://www.paseo60.com/en/

Archeological sites:

Uxmal

https://www.inah.gob.mx/zonas/110-zona-arqueologica-de-uxmal

Ruta Puuc

Chichen Itzá

https://inah.gob.mx/zonas/146-zona-arqueologica-de-chichen-itza

Museums

Museo Regional de Antropología  de Yucatán, Palacio Cantón

https://www.inah.gob.mx/museos/museo-regional-de-antropologia-de-yucatan-palacio-canton

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán

https://macay.org/p/1/museo

El Gran Museo del Mundo Maya

https://www.granmuseodelmundomaya.com.mx/

Geological Attractions

https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5784/

https://www.craterchicxulub.com.mx/en/chicxulub-science-museum/

Nearby towns

Izamal

https://www.yucatan.gob.mx/?p=izamal

Maní

https://pueblosmagicos.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/yucatan/mani/

Mérida Leisure

Parque La Plancha

https://granparquelaplanchadotorg.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/una-propuesta-de-gran-parque-la-plancha-a-c/

For Reading

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/22/travel/things-to-do-merida-mexico.html?searchResultPosition=1

Popol Vuh (The Sacred book of the Maya)  (Maya-Quiché cultures) 

Juan García Ponce, (1966) La casa en la Playa (Translation The House in the Beach, Texas Pan American Series).

Interview with Adam Apt, HSS Member for over 50 Years!

  Adam Apt

Where did you grow up and what was it like?

I grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts, a comfortable mostly middle-class town (with a wealthy district and some working-class, but not poor, districts) and a good public school system. It's long been a 'bedroom community' for Harvard and MIT and the other universities in the Boston area, and most of my friends' fathers were highly educated professionals of one sort or another. (Mothers often worked, but usually not full time at a level commensurate with their education.) My father was a physical chemist, who, before I was born, had decided he didn't enjoy college teaching and became an industry consultant. By the time I got to high school, the town seemed very boring, which, as I later realized, was one of the reasons it attracted our parents. My circle of friends tended to be intellectually engaged, but this was a time before competitive students were expected to fill every minute of their schedules with programmed 'extracurricular activities'.

You became a member of HSS in high school. What was the spark that led to your interest in history of science? And how did you find HSS?

It's important to remember that I was going through school in the wake of the US response to Sputnik, and it was a time of innovation in the teaching of science, especially physics. New school curricula for science were being developed at the local universities. In 7th grade (my first year of junior high school), my friends and I were in a science course named 'Time, Space, and Matter', which stressed learning to observe the natural world while minimizing preconceptions, and introduced concepts of systematic experimentation. (In the next two years, we had 'PS 1' and 'PS 2', that is, physical science, and in 11th grade, PSSC Physics.) This course assigned us, throughout the year, booklets with short, classic texts in the history of scientific observation. I recall, in particular, booklets containing excerpts from Galileo's Sidereal Messenger, Huxley's On a Piece of Chalk, and excerpts from John Wesley Powell's Canyons of the Colorado (which I enjoyed so much that, when I was in high school, I bought and read the entire book). That alone didn't turn me toward the history of science, but it nearly coincided with my parents's asking me if I might be interested in a telescope as a bar mitzvah present; I was. I hadn't up to this point had any particular orientation toward astronomy, but this turned me that way, and somehow my attention very quickly turned toward the history of astronomy. As odd as I think this sounds, I became hooked after reading Dreyer's biography of Tycho Brahe when I was in 9th grade. In high school, I was reading classic English-language texts on ancient and later mathematical astronomy, including Neugebauer's Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Heath's Greek Astronomy, Dicks's Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle, and Small's An Account of the Astronomical Discoveries of Kepler. Somewhere along the way, I started seeing references to articles in a journal named Isis, which seemed to be where good stuff on the subject was published. I no longer remember how I found that it was published by HSS, and how I located the society and wrote off to join and to get a subscription, in the middle of my senior year in high school, January 1973.

I should add that at this time, I had no idea how to be an historian. To me, learning history consisted of reading books and articles on the subject and picking up facts, not asking questions, or reading the books critically; it was a sort of antiquarianism of the intellect. I actually knew more about asking questions about nature than about history, and, indeed, I had only one history course in high school, the state-mandated course in US history. I'm not sure I properly learned how to frame a question about history and to pursue a productive line of thought until I became a graduate student. In college, I took a lot of physics, but just two history courses (one of which lasted two semesters), neither bearing on the history of science. But my heart wasn't in the science; it was in the books on the history of science, which I continued to read on my own, to the detriment of other studies. In my senior year, at last, I had an idea: I designed a project for myself, for course credit, in the history of astronomy. There was no one at my college (Amherst) who had the knowledge to supervise this project, and I took the initiative of asking Owen Gingerich, at Harvard, if he would be my supervisor. He very generously agreed, and we worked things out with Amherst.

How did your background in history of science pave the way for your career in finance?

My background in the history of science is more or less unrelated to my career in finance. I decided, as I neared the end of my graduate work, that (like my father) I did not want to pursue an academic career. After a period of indirection, and with some parental urging, I decided to get an MBA and to try business. I recall sitting by myself one evening in my parents' living room--I lived with my parents while I saved earnings from a boring job to pay for business school--and running through the reasons for my transition: I'd tried some teaching as a graduate student and didn't enjoy it; I wanted a larger salary than an historian would make; I wanted to be able to choose where I lived and not have to live wherever I could find an academic job; I knew I worked very slowly, and I felt that I would have difficulty turning out publications when I was applying for one short-term position after another; and I was cocky, and thought (wrongly) that business would be relatively easy. And as I ran through these reasons, I also realized that I couldn't rank order them; I still can't.

But here's where there is, for me, a connection with finance: When I got to business school, I found that what engaged me were the mathematical models in investing (not economics generally). I found that the mathematical simplicity of the explanatory models of modern finance drew me in just as the simplicity and power of Ptolemaic astronomy had drawn me in some years earlier. And so I chose investment management for my career. At the time I entered the profession, I was in the minority who hadn't been drawn in through a fascination with individual corporate stocks. Things have changed in the profession.

Naturally, I've become curious about the history of modern financial economics, and when I was starting out, most of the founders of the field were alive. There's been some good work on the history of the subject by non-professional historians. Out of curiosity, I continue to read books and articles on this subject, though only the historical data affect how I think about my practice. There is, by the way, a new, feature-length Errol Morris film, Tune Out the Noise, commissioned by the firm Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), about the history of modern finance, which gives a very limited and distorted account of the subject, seeming to make it solely the product of the University of Chicago (and, not incidentally, DFA), which happens to be where I got my MBA. But it's an Errol Morris film, and very entertaining. You probably know that he began graduate work in the history of science.

How did you feel when you were asked to run for HSS Treasurer?