The History of Science Society

Vol. 39, No.3, July 2010
Printer friendly version of Newsletter

Member News

Warwick Anderson’s The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) was awarded the 2010 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and the 2009 New South Wales Premier’s General History Prize. Warwick’s New Guinea research was featured in the October 2008 HSS Newsletter—
hssonline.org/publications/Newsletter2008/NewsletterOct2008Anderson.html
Carin Berkowitz has been named the new Associate Director of the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. Carin will begin her duties in August 2010 after completing her PhD dissertation defense in the Science and Technology Studies Department of Cornell University. She was a Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science (PACHS) Fellow in 2009–2010.
Krishna Dronamraju’s forthcoming book, Haldane, Mayr and Beanbag Genetics, Oxford University Press, 2010, sums up the classic debate between J.B.S. Haldane and Ernst Mayr on the significance of the mathematical contributions of R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and S. Wright to the theory of evolution. The book includes the correspondence between Haldane and Mayr.
Jim Endersby, senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, has been appointed a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He will be teaching and researching in the Department of History and Sociology of Science during the 2010–11 academic year.
Mark Finlay (Armstrong Atlantic State University) won the Agricultural History Society’s Theodore Saloutus Memorial Prize for the best book on agricultural history published in 2009, for his book Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the politics of National Security (Rutgers, 2009).
Monica H. Green, Arizona State University, and Florence Eliza Glaze, Coastal Carolina University, received a grant from the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, NC) to support a project “Excavating Medicine in a Digital Age: Paleography and the Medical Book in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.” The grant will support an intensive weekend of discussion of a group of historians and paleographers to examine the extant medical manuscripts from ca. 1075–ca. 1225.
Also, Professor Green and Rachel Scott (Arizona State University) have received $45,000 funding from the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU to conduct a year-long project entitled: “The Origins of Leprosy as a Physical Disease and Social Condition in Medieval Western Europe.” The project seeks to create ways to open up dialogue between the history of medicine and the historicist scientific disciplines of paleopathology, genomics, and paleomicrobiology.
Piers Hale (University of Oklahoma) was awarded the University of Oklahoma’s 2010 General Education Teaching Award. This award is given “to the faculty member whose teaching is considered to have contributed most to the University-wide general education program.” It is the first time this award, inaugurated in 1994, has been given to a member of OU’s History of Science Department.
Rod Home (Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne) was recently appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) “for service to education as a scholar and archivist of the history and philosophy of science.”
Susan D. Jones’ (University of Minnesota) book, Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax, will be published this fall by The Johns Hopkins University Press in time for HSS. Further Information:
www.cbs.umn.edu/eeb/faculty/JonesSusan/
Rich Kremer will be spending the 2010–11 year at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, studying the history of the concept/ collection/ preservation of “data” in astronomy for a project entitled “Sciences of the Archive.”
Steven J. Livesey was honored by the University of Oklahoma with an appointment to the Brian E. and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professorship. Presidential Professorships are awarded to OU faculty members “who excel in all their professional activities and who relate those activities to the students they teach and mentor,” and who exemplify “the ideals of a scholar through their endeavors in teaching, research and creative scholarly activity, and professional and university service.”
Roy MacLeod, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Sydney, is this year’s Charles A. Lindbergh Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Adrienne Mayor’s (Stanford University) book The Poison King: Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton UP 2009) was one of five finalists in Nonfiction for the National Book Award 2009. It also won the Gold Medal for Biography in the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards 2010.
Suzanne Moon has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma.
Bruce Moran has been named the Dibner Distinguished Fellow of the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library for 2010–2011.
Lawrence Principe (John Hopkins University) was awarded the F. C. Donders Visiting Professorship at the University of Utrecht, where he will spend four months and, incidentally, but not randomly, escape the Baltimore summer.
Gregory Radick has been promoted to a professorship in history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds.
Stephen Randoll received his Ph.D. from St. Louis University this past May, along with the Thomas P. Neill Outstanding Dissertation Award for his dissertation titled “The Politics of Public Health in Chicago, 1850–1930.” This past June he accepted a one-year appointment teaching history at St. Charles Community College in Missouri.
George Saliba (Columbia University) was appointed as a Carnegie Scholar for the years 2009–2011, for a project to study “The Encounter between Modern European Science and Islamic Societies.” The project will allow him to visit several European and Middle Eastern Manuscript collections.
Darwin H. Stapleton has been appointed Professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He will serve as Director of and teach in the four-course archives track within the department’s M.A. in history. Prospective students are invited to contact him at: darwin.stapleton@umb.edu
Wesley M. Stevens (History, University of Winnipeg) has accepted appointment as Visiting Professor of Classics at the University of Manitoba. He has been awarded a Collaborative Research Grant of $120,000.from the National Endowment for the Humanities—for the project: “Latin Mathematical and Scientific Terms before A.D. 1200.” His collaborators are Dietrich Lohrmann (Aachen, Germany) and James Dobreff (Lund, Sweden). They expect to produce a lexicon of 2200 Latin words which have been omitted from Latin dictionaries or have been poorly defined, neglecting their mathematical or other scientific meanings, and thereby creating a misunderstanding of Roman and medieval cultures to the neglect of the sciences.
James E. Strick has been elected chair of the Department of Earth and Environment at Franklin and Marshall. His term runs from 1 July 2010 through 30 June 2013.
Edith Dudley Sylla (North Carolina State University) has been named by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences) Visiting Professor in the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science at Radboud University, Nijmegen. The appointment, which began in May 2010, includes visits over the period of the following year.
Ron B. Thomson and Menso Folkerts (Munich) have created a list of the 600+ manuscripts in the history of science and mathematics owned by Prince Baldessaro Boncompagni (1821–1894), which was dispersed by auction in Rome in 1898. They have added current shelf-marks for over 200 of these items. This list has now been posted at the website where there is a link to “Boncompagni Manuscripts.”
Further Information: thomson@chass.utoronto.ca and www.warburg.sas.ac.uk/mnemosyne/Orientation/mathematics.htm
Virginia Trimble was awarded a Doctora Honoris Causa from the University of Valencia in Feb 2010. She also received the Georges van Biesbroeck Prize from the American Astronomical Society, which was announced earlier this year.
Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr) was awarded a Scholar’s Award from the NSF for the upcoming year (2010–11), to finish her book on medieval automata.
Rienk Vermij has been promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma.

Ron Rainger’s Retirement Reward

Ron Rainger’s Retirement

Pictured from left to right: John Beatty, Gregory Good, Mott Greene, Anita Guerrini, Keith Benson, Ron Rainger, Helen Rozwadowski, Naomi Oreskes, Jane Maienschein, Michael Osborne

To commemorate Ron Rainger’s impending retirement from the Department of History at Texas Tech University, a number of his close colleagues (many of whom were fellow graduate students) gathered for a one-day meeting in Lubbock on 11 January 2010. Jane Maineschein (Arizona State), Mott Greene (University of Puget Sound), Greg Good (American Institute of Physics), Naomi Oreskes (UC San Diego), John Beatty (University of British Columbia), Helen Rozwadowski (University of Connecticutt), Michael Osborne (Oregon State University), Anita Guerrini (Oregon State University), and Keith Benson presented short papers that often featured reflections on Rainger’s own work or his influence on the work of his colleagues.

The idea for the meeting came from Jane Maienschein, who then coordinated the actual content of the meeting with Mott Greene. Rainger’s colleagues at Texas Tech helped to organize the setting for the meeting, to arrange departmental support for the social events, and to serve as emcees for the actual presentations. Financial support also came from the Provost’s Office at Texas Tech, the Department of History, Arizona State University (Maienschein), Hornung Research Fund (Guerrini), and several individuals.

Rainger’s colleagues joined him the day before the meeting for a wonderful meal in his home, arranged by his wife Judy. The talks in Rainger’s honor were delivered the next day to a large audience in the Student Union Building on campus, an audience consisting of many of his former and current students, his colleagues at Texas Tech, and many close friends and family members. The celebratory day also included a luncheon hosted by the Department of History for the speakers and a fabulous reception/dinner following the major event and hosted in the home of two of Rainger’s colleagues.

Perhaps the most poignant moment was at the end of the day-long meeting when Rainger was asked to come to the stage. There, one of his graduate students presented him with a plaque commemorating his long career as a teacher and scholar. It should be noted that Rainger has won every possible teaching award at Texas Tech. It was abundantly clear from the reception he received from the audience that he will always be remembered as one the greatest teachers at the University. As he grasped the award, Rainger was at a loss for words...and there was not a dry-eye among the audience. It was truly an honor for all of us to acknowledge such a wonderful friend and colleague.

Keith R. Benson
Vashon Island, Washington

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Many of you have commented on the superb work of Michal Meyer, who served as managing editor for the HSS Newsletter for nearly 7 years. As a graduate student in the HSS office, she taught herself Quark and then InDesign so as to create a captivating look for the Newsletter. She introduced numerous feature items—profiles of graduate programs, photo essays, workplace viewpoints, and various other Newsletter standards—and worked tirelessly as she solicited, edited, and proofread hundreds of articles, covering some 26 issues of the Newsletter. Her new duties as the Editor in Chief and as Manager of Public Programming at the Chemical Heritage Foundation will keep her from assisting with future issues of the Newsletter, and she has our profound thanks for her many years of work. She also is to be congratulated for finishing her dissertation on Mary Somerville and receiving her doctorate—well done, Michal.

The HSS Executive Office is moving to Notre Dame!

Our new contact information, effective 16 August 2010, is:
History of Science Society
440 Geddes Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone: 574-631-1194
Fax: 574-631-1533
Our email addresses and web site URL will remain the same:
E-mail: info@hssonline.org
Web site: http://www.hssonline.org/

History of Science Society

Member News

Quick Links....

Ron Rainger’s Retirement Reward

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

The HSS Executive Office is moving to Notre Dame!

Primary Navigation

Search

History of Science Society

Frequently Used Sites