New Books in the History of Science
639 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with historians of science about their new books
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
February 18, 2013 13:26 - 1 hourBy focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eatin...
Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America” (Johns Hopkins, 2013)
February 04, 2013 20:10 - 50 minutesAudra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War. Wolfe pulls together a rich and disparate literature to provide a thematic, chronological and accessible story about the distinctive ways that Americans wove science and government together for the five decades after WWII. Beyond the familiar story of physics, Wolfe shows not only ho...
Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn” (Harvard UP, 2012)
January 28, 2013 19:52 - 1 hourImagine the academic world as a beach. The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life. There is a world between the grains, however – a world of unofficial, accidental, and trans-departmental conversations and inspirations. And it is within that “interstitial academy” that some of the most remarkable work in the history of modern social and h...
Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012)
January 22, 2013 14:42 - 1 hourIn Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science. Science can be characterized not by its content, but instead by its methodology. Starting from this premise, Beckwith focuses on a crucial part of this methodology, the recursive argument method. Developed among Central Asian Buddhist scholars, the recursive method was transmit...
Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
January 09, 2013 16:51 - 1 hourYou were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us throug...
Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
December 19, 2012 14:16 - 1 hourWhen I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what ...
Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
December 13, 2012 22:11 - 1 hourBefore the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of scien...
Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
December 03, 2012 16:54 - 1 hourGenentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA technology into a thriving business. It is the story of the emergence of a new hybrid organism, the entrepreneurial biologist, who lived with one leg in academia and one in corporate research. It is the story of a series of compounds that became big business in the American corporate world: human insulin,...
Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
November 26, 2012 17:24 - 1 hourDaniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eight...
Dan Healey, “Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939” (Northern Illinois UP, 2009)
November 26, 2012 14:33 - 1 hourI have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey’s new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a ga...
David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012)
November 20, 2012 20:34 - 1 hourIn Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of fossils in the light of evolutionary theory. Starting with Darwin and his dilemma concerning the fossil record, Sepkoski tracks the relationships between paleontology and evolutionary theory over the course of the twentieth century. As it was for...
Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011)
October 26, 2012 19:18 - 1 hourPamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropology and in the work of Peter Galison, to explain the gradual breaking-down of the distinction be...
Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)” (Oxford UP, 2012)
October 19, 2012 11:27 - 1 hourChallenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722). It focuses on the history of mathematics in this context, but situates the story of mathematics and Kangxi within a larger framework that extends from the late Ming through the years after Kangxi’s reign, and treating much more than mathematics in the course of th...
Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011)
October 04, 2012 21:02 - 1 hourFrom artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the landscape of self-moving entities as actual and conceptual objects. He allows us a glimpse into the ...
Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
September 19, 2012 19:10 - 55 minutesDenise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerg...
Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
September 04, 2012 18:15 - 1 hour“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.” First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we t...
Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011)
August 29, 2012 18:49 - 1 hourThis is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, o...
Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
August 11, 2012 22:04 - 1 hourIn Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges i...
Roger Hart, “The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
July 27, 2012 20:13 - 1 hourRoger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006)
July 17, 2012 21:19 - 1 hourShould we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see? This question informs a long history of debates over scientific realism and the extent to which we trust what contemporary and future scientific theories tell us about unobservable phenomena. Using the history of science as an evidentiary archive, Kyle Stanford explores this set of problems in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Uncon...
David A. Kirby, “Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema” (MIT Press, 2011)
July 02, 2012 13:34 - 1 hourFirst things first: this was probably the most fun I’ve had working through an STS monograph. (Really: Who doesn’t like reading about Jurassic Park and King Kong?) In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby‘s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relati...
Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011)
June 15, 2012 17:39 - 34 minutesJessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the late 19th century. Engineered irrigation appealed to both private individuals and the state as a way of mediating California’s competing interests, creating prosperity and fulfilling an American agrarian ideal. Ideas about irrigation, settlement a...
John Cheng, “Astounding Wounder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
June 01, 2012 18:03 - 1 hourJohn Cheng‘s new book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) uncovers the material and social circumstances that created the social phenomenon of American science fiction. To a population already enamored with the products of scientific research (aviation, automobiles and movies, for example), science fiction magazines offered opportunities for exploring science’s transformative potential, for re-imagining the boun...
Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
May 23, 2012 18:48 - 1 hourI love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices ...
D. Graham Burnett, “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
May 15, 2012 14:36 - 1 hourGraham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2012) s an astounding book. It is an inspiring work, both in the depth of research brought to bear in Burnett’s account of the emergence of twentieth-century whale science, and the sensitivity with which he renders the characters in his story. Burnett’s writing is characteristically thoughtful, elegant, and compelling. Readers will be moved, as I was, by his sensitive rende...
Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012)
May 15, 2012 10:30 - 1 hourWe’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of historians of science and philosophers of science. But another perspective on them is from the point of view of cognition. For example, how do scientists come up with breakthroughs? What happens when a scientist confronts a new theory that conflicts with an established one? In what ways does her belief sys...
Suman Seth, “Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926” (MIT Press, 2010)
February 24, 2012 20:14 - 1 hourThough Einstein, Planck, and Pauli have become household names in the history of science, the work of Arnold Sommerfeld has yet to reach the same level of wide recognition outside the field of theoretical physics and its history. In Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT Press, 2010), Suman Seth not only makes a compelling case for the centrality of Sommerfeld as a theoretician and teacher of physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur...
Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011)
February 01, 2012 21:11 - 1 hourFirst things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written story that treats the nature of writing, bodies, beauty, images, violence, and history in creating experiences of the earth. The characters are compelling, the story is import...
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011)
January 24, 2012 20:28 - 1 hourMarta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011)
November 30, 2011 21:17 - 1 hourSimply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones‘s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011). It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010)
November 01, 2011 16:59 - 1 hourIn what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
October 10, 2011 19:28 - 54 minutesWe’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains ...
Michael Kevaak, “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking” (Princeton UP, 2011)
July 12, 2011 19:40 - 1 hourIn the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 31, 2011 18:19 - 59 minutesIn her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Peter Baehr, “Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences” (Stanford UP, 2010)
May 16, 2011 14:48 - 56 minutesContemporary research into illiberal governments draws much inspiration from the writings of Hannah Arendt. In her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt claimed that Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia were not merely typical authoritarian regimes, but rather were despotisms of a new “totalitarian” sort. Arendt believed “totalitarianism” was entirely unprecedented, and she took the social sciences to task for failing to recognize it as such. Peter Baehr is sympathetic to Arendt’...
Ian Sample, “Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science” (Basic Books, 2010)
January 14, 2011 19:08 - 1 hourYou’ve probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s the largest (17 miles around!), most expensive (9 billion dollars!) scientific instrument in history. What’s it do? It accelerates beams of tiny particles (protons) to nearly the speed of light and then smashes them into one another. That’s cool, you say, but why? Well, the simple answer is this: it was built to test the validity of the way most physicists understand the origins and essence of everything, that is, the “standard ...
Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)
December 17, 2010 19:09 - 1 hourWhat should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and ...
James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010)
October 20, 2010 16:37 - 1 hourIn the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or may...
Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007)
February 27, 2008 00:12 - 59 minutesThis week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press, 2007). Dr. Foerstner teaches news writing and science writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In addition, Dr. Foerstner served as a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune for ten years, where she wrote articles about science and the environment. She is the author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Sh...