New Books in the History of Science
639 episodes - English - Latest episode: 20 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with historians of science about their new books
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Episodes
James McElvenny, "A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIngrid Piller speaks with James McElvenny about his new book A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II (Edinburgh UP, 2024). This book offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shapin...
Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesClaudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity's irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In The Beauty o...
Huaping Lu-Adler, "Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesKant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic ...
Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBooks about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) acclaimed...
Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesIn Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA's space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the un...
Maarten Couttenier, "Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)" (Routledge, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesMaarten Couttenier's Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922) (Routledge, 2023) examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of 'race' structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists mainly used physical characters, like skull form and the color of hair and eyes, to delimitate 'races', which wer...
Beth Linker, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesIn 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic hea...
Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourExploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Ruth A. Morgan reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organisations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnat...
Lorraine Daston, "Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate" (Columbia Global Reports, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023), Lorraine Daston, Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, delves into the 350-year history of one of the most elusive communities of all: the “scientific community.” For the apparent simplicity and relative ubiquity of the expression hides in fact a complex and constantly evolving reality. As Daston puts it to open her book, “The scientific community is by any measure a ve...
Kenneth Miller, "Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep" (Hachette Books, 2023)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutesWhy do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep? A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness. In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research particip...
Alan Bollard, "Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesWartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford UP, 2020) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance the military...
Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesHow did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...
Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 28, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesIn Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarch...
Alison M. Downham Moore, "The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesIn The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2022), Alison Downham Moore discusses her contribution to the history of women's ageing. Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doct...
Chen-Pang Yeang, "Transforming Noise. A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955" (2023)
January 30, 2024 05:00 - 56 minutesToday, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history she...
Elinor Cleghorn, "Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World" (Dutton, 2022)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesMedicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women’s bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine’s history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women’s resistance, strength and incredible courage. In this ground-breaking history Dr. Elinor Cleghorn unpacks ...
Camillo Leonardi, "Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones" (Penn State UP, 2023)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesFirst published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithotherapy. Today Jana Byars talks to Liliana Leopardi about her new translation, Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones (Penn State University Press, 2023). In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. L...
Catherine Powell-Warren, "Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesJana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). The conversation begins by examining the ways modern scholars are radically changing our understanding of the position of early modern women one monograph at a time before dialing in on a book that does just that. At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Bloc...
The Future of Images of Human Evolution
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesWe are all familiar with the “march of progress” image - the representation of evolution that depicts a series of apelike creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching the upright human form. It’s a powerful image. In his book Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image (Yale UP, 2024), Professor Gowan Dawson examines its origins and its influence on the public understanding of evolution. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. O...
Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesThe history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and...
Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between networks and maps through a collection of essays. Using historical maps, he explores: triangulation networks used to establish the baselines of a map’s scale; astronomical observations, ellipsoids, geodetic arcs, telegraph networks, and GPS constellations that establish latitude and longitude at control...
Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020)
January 04, 2024 04:00 - 1 hourPaul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told. In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the My...
Douglas Hunter, "Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1936, long before the discovery of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, the Royal Ontario Museum made a sensational acquisition: the contents of a Viking grave that prospector Eddy Dodd said he had found on his mining claim east of Lake Nipigon. The relics remained on display for two decades, challenging understandings of when and where Europeans first reached the Americas. In 1956 the discovery was exposed as an unquestionable hoax, tarnishing the reputation of the museum director...
Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesToday I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018) is a collection of letters which were carefully curated by Erika and Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, and Patrick Farrell. During our discussion, Erika recounts the special relationship between two intellectual juggernauts, Huxley and Osmond, and their discu...
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives. In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive ran...
Wayne Soon, "Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon...
Katherine D. Von Schaik, "How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness" (Galen) (Princeton UP, 2024)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesThe second-century Greek physician Galen—the most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates—is a central figure in Western medicine. A talented doctor, surgeon, writer, philosopher, teacher, pharmacologist, and inventor, Galen attended the court of Marcus Aurelius, living through outbreaks of plague (likely smallpox) that devastated the Roman Empire. He also served as physician for professional gladiators, boasting that only two fighters died during his first year (his predecessor had lost...
Emma K. Sutton, "William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesEmma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work. William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his interest in medicine influenced his life and work, driving his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and...
Ran Zwigenberg, "Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourRan Zwigenberg’s Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores early efforts by the American military, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists to understand the effects of the atomic bombings on the minds of those who had survived. In positioning the book as “a prehistory of PTSD,” Zwigenberg draws attention to the historicity of the idea of psychological “trauma” before the concept was institutionalized i...
Peter Bellerby, "The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesPeter Bellerby is the founder of Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, the world's only truly bespoke makers of globes. His team of skilled craftspeople make exquisite terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world. In The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury, 2023), he introduces us to this world. The story began after his attempt to find a special globe for his father's 80th birthday. Failing to find anything suitable, he decided to make one himse...
David K. Zimmerman, "Ensnared Between Hitler and Stalin: Refugee Scientists in the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn the 1930s, hundreds of scientists and scholars fled Hitler’s Germany. Many found safety, but some made the disastrous decision to seek refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The vast majority of these refugee scholars were arrested, murdered, or forced to flee the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. Many of the survivors then found themselves embroiled in the Holocaust. Ensnared Between Hitler and Stalin: Refugee Scientists in the USSR (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores the forced migration of t...
Maura C. Flannery, "In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants" (Yale UP, 2023)
November 14, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesIn In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants (Yale University Press, 2023), Maura C. Flannery elucidates how herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science. Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time...
Woodrow Wilson: Patrick Weil’s "The Madman in the White House"
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Patrick Weil, author of The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023). Weil discusses the beginnings of a book published in 1960 by Ambassador William C. Bullitt, who wrote on the mental health of President Woodrow Wilson with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Delving into archival research, Weil found th...
Leonie Hannan, "A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home" (Manchester UP, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLeonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters a...
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” – who, like the mythological Prometheus, brought atomic fire to mankind. In deep detail, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage, 2006) explores Oppenheimer’s early career at the forefront of quantum physics, his associations...
Elena Serrano, "Ladies of Honor and Merit. Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode I interview Elena Serrano, a research member of the Project Cirgen at the Universitat de València and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona). She trained in the former Centre for the History of Science in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in the History of Science and Philosophy Department in Cambridge University before taking postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science i...
Branko Milanovic, "Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War" (Harvard UP, 2023)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutes"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot ...
Jonathan Downs, "Discovery at Rosetta: Revealing Ancient Egypt" (American University in Cairo Press, 2020)
October 15, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn 1798, young French general Napoleon Bonaparte entered Egypt with a veteran army and a specialist group of savants—scientists, engineers, and artists—his aim being not just conquest, but the rediscovery of the lost Nile kingdom. A year later, in the ruins of an old fort in the small port of Rosetta, the savants made a startling discovery: a large, flat stone, inscribed in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and ancient hieroglyphics. This was the Rosetta Stone, key to the two-thousand-year mystery of ...
E. Summerson Carr, "Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesMotivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (U Chicago Press, 2023), E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination...
Stephen Bales, "Serapis: The Sacred Library and Its Declericalization" (Library Juice Press, 2021)
October 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Greco-Egyptian syncretistic god Serapis was used by the 3rd century BCE Ptolemaic pharaohs to impose Greek cultural hegemony and consolidate political power. The Alexandrian Serapeum, sometimes referred to as The Great Library of Alexandria’s “daughter library,” may be seen as an archetype for institutions where religion and secular knowledge come together for the reproduction of ideologies. The Serapeum, however, is by no means unique in this regard; libraries have always incorporated re...
Joshua May, "Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIs free will an illusion? Is addiction a brain disease? Should we enhance our brains beyond normal? Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science (Oxford UP, 2023) blends philosophical analysis with modern brain science to address these and other critical questions through captivating cases. The result is a nuanced view of human agency as surprisingly diverse and flexible. With a lively and accessible writing style, Neuroethics is an indispensable resource for students and scholars in both ...
Claudine Chavannes-Mazel and Linda Ijpelaar, "The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
October 02, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesHow 'green' were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about t...
Michael D. Gordin, "Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourEveryone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience f...
Debapriya Sarkar, "Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDebapriya Sarkar’s new book, titled Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) is a study of how poets and philosophers took up the “the possible” as an alternative to the actual. By pushing back against the positivism we associate so strongly with the scientific revolution, the literary texts examined in this book—Margaret Cavendish’s poetry and prose, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Milton’...
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesThe East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and politica...
Christopher T. Fleming et al., "Science and Society in the Sanskrit World" (Brill, 2023)
September 14, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesScience and Society in the Sanskrit World (Brill, 2023) lauds the remarkable career of Christopher Z. Minkowski, the erstwhile Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Balliol College, University of Oxford. The volume contains seventeen essays, written by Professor Minkowski's colleagues and students, that explore a kaleidoscopic array of classical Sanskrit scientific disciplines, such as grammar, jurisprudence, theology, and hermeneutics. Individually, these essays offer substantive contributions to t...
Neil Tarrant, "Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
September 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourNeil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was prope...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Situating Religion and Medicine (with Michael Stanley-Baker)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I sit down for an in-depth conversation with my good friend, Michael Stanley-Baker, a scholar of Chinese religion and medicine. We talk about Mike’s international childhood and how his family history influenced his intellectual life, his training as a Chinese medical practitioner, and his book co-edited with Vivienne Lo, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2022), which is groundbreaking... and open access! We also talk about Mike’s new book with Manchester University ...
Herlinde Koelbl, "Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time" (MIT Press, 2023)
September 06, 2023 04:00 - 28 minutesAn intimate collection of portraits of internationally renowned scientists and Nobel Prize winners, paired with interviews and personal stories. What makes a brilliant scientist? Who are the people behind the greatest discoveries of our time? Connecting art and science, photographer Herlinde Koelbl seeks the answers in this English translation of the German book Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time (MIT Press, 2023), an indelible collection of portrait...