January 2008 Newsletter, Vol. 37, No.1
Program Profile: University of California, Santa Barbara
and University of Athens
University of California, Santa Barbara
When was your program established and how has it developed since its inception?
The origin of UCSB’s Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine stretches back to 1965 and the arrival on campus of the historian of technology, Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., who had claimed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1962 under A. Hunter Dupree. Lawrence Badash, a historian of the physical sciences mentored by Yale University’s Derek de Sola Price, arrived the next year. Badash devoted his considerable energies to the history of science and taught classes from antiquity to the present. Pursell, who in 1989 moved on to lead history of technology activities at Case Western Reserve University, taught history of technology and engaged in public historical activities while at UCSB. Badash retired in 2002, and both mentored several dissertations, including those of the consulting historian and UCSB lecturer, Peter Neushul, and Professors Zuoyue Wang of California State University, Pomona; Lynne Stark and Elizabeth Hodes of Santa Barbara City College; and Jacob Hamblin of Clemson University.
Current Program members and their topics and areas of expertise include: Anita Guerrini (Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe, anatomy, emergent diseases, and human experimentation), Michael A. Osborne (Modern Europe, imperialism, biology, medicine), W. Patrick McCray (Cold War science and technology, emerging technologies), and Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Modern Latin America, race, and bio-prospecting). Strongly enhancing Program activities are Chicano Studies Professor Gerardo V. Aldana (indigenous science and culture in Latin America), and Program lecturers Peter Neushul (American technology), Peter Westwick (recent technology and the physical sciences), and Gregory Graves (American environmental history).
What are the comprehensive exam fields?
The Program is one of more than a dozen Ph.D. tracks within the department of history. Students must complete three research seminars: one class on ancient science; one on the Scientific Revolution; one on the specialized historiography of HSTM; and one course on modern medicine, science, or technology. Three written comprehensive examinations of three hours each, followed by an oral examination on these and a fourth field (often external to the history department), and competence in one foreign language, and an acceptable dissertation prospectus, complete the transition to ABD status, which most students complete in three years or less.
What are the faculty, program, and resource strengths?
Our programmatic strengths lie in the Early Modern and Modern eras, principally in the history of health and healing, American technology and physical science, environmental topics, and the sciences of Europe and Latin America. Program faculty support graduate students from a number of external grants, including the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, and the Templeton Foundation. This is in addition to university and department fellowships and funding.
UCSB is ideal for graduate students who seek an entrepreneurial academic environment with historical interests in the post-Renaissance era. The Program and history department are also appropriate for those students seeking to develop the skills to teach the “bread and butter” survey classes of many history departments: U.S., European, World, Latin American, or environmental topics in addition to history of science, technology, and medicine. The Program’s profile is an interdisciplinary one, and students make frequent use of funding and intellectual opportunities offered by the Center for Early Modern Studies, the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, and the Center for Cold War Studies and International History.
UCSB is a medium-sized campus where five faculty members have won Nobel prizes in the last nine years. We strive to provide students with substantial individual attention. Graduate students select programs for diverse reasons and while the social character of ours is difficult to characterize, one former student recalls deciding on graduate study in the history of science because his major professor wore sandals and shorts to his initial interview. That same student received two job offers upon graduation, and has recently been seen in a tie, as well as a wet suit, but not simultaneously. Badash organized many “death marches” for faculty and students, meaning hikes of several miles and indefinite duration, usually in the Santa Barbara front country but also on the Pacific Crest Trail. One now tenured and prize-winning graduate remembers learning more history of science while hiking and during informal activities with professors than he did in class, and a current tenured professor at an unnamed institution was so caught up in the Gaia hypothesis that the hiking group she led missed a crucial turn and hiked several additional but memorable miles. That we followed her lead and continued discussing our own intellectual imperatives of Darwin, the importance of kelp in military technology, and Newton’s true derivation of the inverse square law is indicative of the possibilities of graduate study here.
Finally, Santa Barbara has touched us all; some current Program members and students have taken to swimming together, learning the finer points of water polo (if only from the pool deck), roasting fish on the beach, and surfing. Thanks to the entrepreneurial energies of Drs. Westwick and Neushul (who teach a new course this spring on the history, technology, and cultures of surfing), the Friday pod of history of science surfers is likely to continue, and our Program is the first unit in university history to teach sports history in a serious fashion. None of us, however, allow social activities to kick sand in our keyboards.
What are some recent dissertations that have been produced by graduating students?
Current graduate students work on a wide range of topics, including the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence; alternative medicine in the Early American Republic; regionalism and American science; eugenics; modern ecology and field studies; religion and science in the space age; early American pharmacology; and disability, religion, and medicine. Dissertations completed in the last three years include:
– John Gregory Whitesides (2004), “Genes, Minds and Selves: American Science, Religion, and the Industry of Faith and Reason”
– Benjamin C. Zulueta (2004), “Brains at a Bargain: Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, American Science, and the Cold War of the Classrooms”
– Evan Widders (2005), “Science, Medicine, and Criollo Culture in Late-Colonial New Spain (Mexico)”
Eric Boyle (2007), “The Boundaries of Medicine: Redefining Therapeutic Orthodoxy in an Age of Reform”
Photo Caption: UCSB Program in HSTM members in 2006 (l to r): W. Patrick McCray, Gerardo Aldana, Anita Guerrini, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Mike Osborne, Peter Neushul. Not shown: Peter Westwick and Greg Graves.
University of Athens
When was your program established and how has it developed since its inception?
Our undergraduate program was established in 1993 with the founding of the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens. We began to admit students in the academic year of 1994-1995. The number of students we accept every year has remained stable (100 undergraduate and 25 graduate students), but the number of faculty has expanded considerably. There are currently 25 faculty members whose research areas include history, philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. History of Science and Technology comprises one of the three divisions of the Department, the others being in Philosophy and Philosophy of Science and in Cognitive Science. Those who work on history of science and technology are:
– Theodore Arabatzis (19th- and 20th-century physical sciences)
– Jean Christianidis (Greek mathematics)
– Dimitris Dialetis (ancient mathematics and astronomy)
– Kostas Dimitracopoulos (logic)
– Stavros Dracopoulos (history of economic thought)
– Kostas Gavroglu (19th- and 20th-century physical sciences)
– George Gotsis (history of social sciences)
– Katerina Ierodiakonou (ancient science and philosophy)
– Manolis Patiniotis (18th-century and modern Greek science)
– Telis Tympas (20th-century technology)
Furthermore, we are in the process of hiring another historian of the physical sciences.
Our department has been successful in obtaining funds from the European Union, the European Science Foundation, the Greek Secretariat for Research and Development, as well as from private sources.
Every year some of the graduates of our program decide to pursue post-graduate study and research in history of science. Some of our best students have been admitted to top foreign institutions (e.g., Cambridge, Imperial College, Oxford, Leeds), as well as to our own graduate program in history and philosophy of science and technology. This program is a joint program of our HPS Department and the Department of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Technical University of Athens.
Some of our colleagues from the National Technical University also specialize in history of science:
– Michalis Assimakopoulos (science and technology studies)
– Vassilis Karasmanis (ancient science and philosophy)
– Yannis Milios (economic thought)
– Maria Rentetzi (20th-century physical sciences, gender & science)
What are the comprehensive exam fields?
Our Masters program takes two years. Our graduate students have to complete the following course requirements: a course on logic; five graduate courses, at least one of which has to be in philosophy of science, one in history of science and one in history of philosophy; four research seminars; they are also required to write a Master’s thesis.
What are the faculty, program, and resource strengths
Our program is also strong in philosophy of science, covering general philosophy of science as well as the philosophy of specific sciences (physics, chemistry, economics, and psychology), and in cognitive science (cognitive psychology and neuroscience).
Our library is strong in recent literature on history and philosophy of science. We have also access to a wide variety of digital sources. Among those particularly noteworthy is Hellinomnimon: A digital library of Greek books and manuscripts on natural philosophy from 1600 to 1821. This library has been developed by our Laboratory for the Electronic Processing of Historical Archives (www.phs.uoa.gr/dlab). For further information see http://www.lib.uoa.gr/hellinomnimon/. Furthermore, many of the faculty members are active in the editorial board of Neusis, the only journal in the history and philosophy of science published in Greek. Neusis has been published twice a year since 1995.
What are some recent doctoral dissertations that have been produced by graduating students?
– Yiannis Antoniou, “Engineers and Engineering Studies in Greece in the 19th and early 20th Century”
– Christiana Christopoulou, “Robert Boyle’s Investigations of Cold”
– Filippos Fournarakis, “A New Interpretation of Greek Geometrical Analysis”
– Nikos Kanderakis, “A history of the concept of work”
– Elena Maniati, “The History of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the University of Athens”
– Sotiris Papaharisis, “Early Greek Mathematics”
– Manolis Patiniotis, “The Appropriation of Newtonian Natural Philosophy by Greek Scholars in the 18th Century”
– Stathis Veltsos, “Chemists as Historians in the 19th Century”
– Pantelis Venardos “The Problem of Capillarity from Laplace to van der Waals”
Further information about our program can be found at:
http://www.phs.uoa.gr/, http://www.hpst.phs.uoa.gr/, and
http://www.cc.uoa.gr/dhps/postgrad1/.