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History of Science at Michigan State University
History of science is growing at Michigan State with its launching of a specialization in the history of science and the adoption of the Women in Science Digital Collection.
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Notes from the Inside
From the President
First Person: Darwin in a Different Voice
Engines of Ingenuity
Playing with Dolphins
The Perils of Publicity
Profile: Leeds University
Patenting Jefferson
SPACEWORK:HSS/NASA Fellowship
2009 Preliminary Program
Koyré Medal, Telescopes,
Southern Host,
Latest News,
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In Memoriam, Jobs, Conferences, Grants
The Department of History at Michigan State University has long been known for its premier African History program. In the past few years the department has also made a serious commitment to the history of science. Michigan State University now has five historians of the life sciences and boasts courses, conferences, and an online digital collection in the history of science.
Our faculty includes:
- Mark Largent, a historian of American biology and medicine who teaches history of science and public policy courses in James Madison College. Mark is the book review editor for the Journal of the History of Biology and editor of the Rutgers Series Studies in Modern Science, Technology and the Environment. His current project explores the ongoing debates over compulsory vaccinations.
- John Waller, a historian of science and medicine who teaches the history of disease, health care, and psychiatry. He has written on the development of the British eugenics movement, the conditions of child laborers in early industrial England, outbreaks of collective hysteria, and is currently writing a study of hereditarian concepts in western history.
- Rich Bellon, a historian of science who divides his attention between the Victorian world of natural history and the modern age of molecular biology. His current research project explores the impact of Darwin’s botany on the debate over evolution in the 1860s. Most of his undergraduate teaching, on the other hand, is driven by an interest in contemporary biomedical and biotechnology policy.
- Georgina Montgomery, a historian of science who teaches the history of animal behavior studies, primatology, and gender and science. Georgina is currently working on her manuscript “Seeing Primates Scientifically,” which explores the development of places and practices for the study of natural primate behavior. She is also working on a new project about the lives of individual gorillas used for science and spectacle in the early to mid-twentieth century.
- Helen Veit, a historian of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries whose first book-length project, Victory over Ourselves: American Food in the Era of the Great War, explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era, and their relationship to ideas about individual self-discipline, scientific rationalization, social and racial progress, and international power. Helen is also the general editor for a book series on food and history with Michigan State University Press.
Many of you will already be familiar with Michigan State because of H-Net and MATRIX. The Department of History’s relationship with MATRIX has enabled Michigan State to adopt the Women in Science Digital Collection from Judith Zinsser (Miami University). Under the guidance of Georgina Montgomery, the collection is being expanded to include archival documents for a number of women in science with accompanying introductions and articles. Georgina welcomes e-mails about how to get your archival documents and research integrated into the site. The Web site will be a wonderful tool in research and undergraduate education, and represents part of the Department of History’s commitment to expanding its focus on the history of science.
Left to right: John Waller, Georgina Montgomery, Mark Largent, Helen Veit, Rich Bellon
The curriculum already includes courses such as ‘Evolution and Society,’ ‘Science and Social Policy,’ ‘Gender, Sex, and Science in Popular Culture,’ ‘Animal Histories,’ ‘Food and Power in American History,’ ‘A History of Nutrition,’ ‘A Brave New World? Biology, Biotechnology, and Human Identity,’ ‘The Human Genome Project,’ ‘Minds and Madness’ and ‘Medicine in Society’. In the future, survey courses and team-taught classes will be added to the undergraduate and graduate curricula.
Such courses within the Department of History are complemented by a range of opportunities at different colleges on the Michigan State campus. The Science, Technology, Environment and Public Policy Specialization [STEPPS] in James Madison College, for example, requires all students to take two science studies courses, and over a third of the specialization’s faculty are historians of science. Similarly, all students in the residential Lyman Briggs College take courses in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPS), which encourage them to explore the connections between science and the wider world. Briggs is a national leader in science pedagogy; its historians actively collaborate in educational innovation, which is generously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and other agencies. HPS courses, by highlighting the intellectual, social and cultural connections between scientific disciplines, serve as a linchpin in Briggs’s core mission to break down conceptual and educational barriers among physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. History of science at MSU is thus indispensable to one of the nation’s most dynamic and grant-winning efforts to reform the education of aspiring scientists and medical professionals.
The interdisciplinarity that characterizes many of the colleges, departments, and programs at Michigan State was exemplified by the “Animals: Past, Present, and Future” conference organized by Georgina Montgomery in April 2009. This interdisciplinary and international conference on human-animal relationships attracted 70 people representing more than seven disciplines and eight countries. Many of the 53 talks were histories of science, including presentations by Erika L. Milam (University of Maryland), Tania Munz (Max Planck), and Ruthanna Dyer (York University). The conference marked the emergence of Michigan State as a leader in Animal Studies, with a graduate specialization in animal studies already established within the Department of Sociology. Georgina is an affiliated faculty with the Animal Studies specialization and will teach one of the core graduate seminars in 2010-2011.
Looking ahead, Michigan State plans to build on these strengths by adding additional graduate and undergraduate history of science courses to the Department of History curriculum, building up the Women in Science Digital Collection, and expanding our faculty. In the fall, for example, we will be searching for a historian of science and a philosopher of science to fill positions at Lyman Briggs College with joint appointments with the Department of History and the Department of Philosophy respectively. To find out more about how Michigan State is integrating history of science into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, visit the links below.
Useful Links
Department of History: http://www.history.msu.edu/
James Madison College: http://www.jmc.msu.edu/
Lyman Briggs College: http://www.lymanbriggs.msu.edu/
Animal Studies Graduate Specialization: http://www.animalstudies.msu.edu/
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