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Vol. 40, No. 1, January 2011
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Warwick Anderson’s (University of Sydney) The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) has been awarded the 2010 Ludwik Fleck Prize at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Tokyo. Lost Souls also received the 2010 William H. Welch Medal and the 2009 New South Wales Premier’s General History Prize. A profile of The Collectors of Lost Souls appeared in the October 2008 HSS Newsletter.

For further information: http://www.hssonline.org/publications/ and http://www.4sonline.org/prizes/fleck

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Bill Barry began serving as NASA’s Chief Historian in September 2010. Prior to his appointment, Dr. Barry served as the NASA European Representative at the United States Embassy in Paris and at NASA Headquarters as a Senior International Programs Specialist and leader of the Russia Team in the Office of External Relations. A graduate, with honors, of the United States Air Force Academy (1979), he also holds a Masters Degree from Stanford University (1987) and a Doctorate from Oxford University (1996). His doctoral dissertation, “The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet Manned Space Policy 1953–1970” won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics History Manuscript Award in 2000.

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On November 13, 2010 James Bartholomew (Ohio State University) delivered an invited lecture in Japanese to members of the Keio University Medical School in Tokyo. The subject of the lecture was the career and Nobel Prize candidacy of the Keio nerve physiologist Gen’ichi Kato (1890–1979), the first person to isolate single nerve and muscle fibers when both were in functioning contact, and who was nominated for the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Barbara Becker’s (University of California, Irvine) book on William Huggins and the origins of astrophysics (Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy) is due to be published in February 2011 by Cambridge University Press. It is the first scholarly biography of nineteenth-century English amateur astronomer William Huggins (1824–1910). A pioneer in adapting the spectroscope to new astronomical purposes, Huggins rose to scientific prominence in London and transformed professional astronomy as a principal founder of the new science of astrophysics. The author re-examines his life and career, exploring unpublished notebooks, correspondence and research projects to reveal the boldness of this scientific entrepreneur. The book also examines Lady Margaret Lindsay Huggins’ (1848–1915) involvement in her husband’s research, which may previously have been overlooked or obscured. http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/...

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Ann Blair’s (Harvard University) book on information management in early modern Europe, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010), is now available from Yale University Press. Blair’s account features figures familiar to historians of science, including Conrad Gesner and Theodor Zwinger.

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Janet Browne (Harvard University) has been elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

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Ken Caneva retired in August from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He will now be able to devote himself to his wide-ranging study of the establishment of the principle of the conservation of energy during the second half of the nineteenth century.

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In October 2010 H. Floris Cohen’s new book How Modern Science Came Into the World. Four Civilizations, One 17th Century Breakthrough came out with Amsterdam University Press. The author replaces the ‘master narrative’ of the origins of modern science with one quite differently organized and far more comprehensive. He first contrasts nature-knowledge in Greece and in China and then shows in a comparative manner how their appropriation and enrichment in Islamic civilization, in medieval Europe, and in Renaissance Europe culminated between c. 1600 and c. 1700 in six revolutionary transformations.

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Richard (Rick) Creath has been selected as a President’s Professor at Arizona State University. This is one of ASU’s top honors, and Rick will join his wife Jane Maienschein as the first couple who are both President’s Professors.

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Edward B. Davis, (Messiah College) has been appointed a Fulbright Senior Specialist to New Zealand, pending final approval by the U.S. Department of State. He will be lecturing at the University of Auckland and the University of Otago in July and August, 2011.

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William Eamon’s (New Mexico State University) latest book, The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (National Geographic Books, 2010) is now available. More information may be found on his website: http://williameamon.com/

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Matthew D. Eddy (Durham University) has just finished editing a special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society entitled: “Prehistoric Minds: Human Origins as a Cultural Artefact, 1780–1930.” He has also received a British Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship for the book that he is writing on graphic culture and the natural sciences during the Scottish Enlightenment. He will be on sabbatical for the 2010–2011 academic year.

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André Feldhof (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) has won the 2010 ESST Award for Aspiring Undergraduates in Science Technology and Society (STS). The award committee thought that Feldhof’s paper offered an informed and elaborate account of the connection between development of policies towards sustainable development in China and the relationship between this Asian country and the European Union. Further Information: http://www.esst.eu/

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On 16 December 2010 Alette Fleischer obtained her PhD in the History of Science and Technology. Her dissertation is titled: “Rooted in Fertile Soil: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Gardens and the Hybrid History of Material and Knowledge Production.” Her promotor is Prof. Dr. L.L. Roberts of the University of Twente, the Netherlands Faculty of STePs Department of the History of Science and Technology.

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The second edition of Donald Forsdyke’s (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada) Evolutionary Bioinformatics (Springer, 2011), despite its daunting title, contains buckets of biohistory. Forsdyke and Alan G. Cock have described the antics of its motley crew (Samuel Butler, Francis Galton, George Romanes, William Bateson) at a more personal level in Treasure Your Exceptions (Cock & Forsdyke, Springer, 2008).

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Judith Grabiner’s (Pitzer College) new book, A Historian Looks Back: The Calculus as Algebra and Selected Writings, is now available in the Mathematical Association of America’s Spectrum Books series.

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Rod Home was recently appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his service to the field of history and philosophy of science in Australia.

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Svante Lindqvist has received the 2010 Leonardo da Vinci Medal. This is the highest recognition from the Society for the History of Technology, which presents it to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the history of technology through research, teaching, publications, and other activities. “We are fortunate that a person of such consummate abilities has devoted so much of himself to the history of technology. In bestowing the Leonardo da Vinci Medal upon Svante Lindqvist, SHOT offers him its deepest thanks and heartfelt appreciation.” Further Information: http://www.shpusa.com/press/davinci.html

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In early 2011, Roy MacLeod will join international colleagues in the history of science as a Fellow-in-Residence at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in the Historischen Sternwarte at the University of Göttingen. Last year, he published a major study of late-19th-century traditions in Anglo-Australian colonial science—“Archibald Liversidge, FRS: Imperial Science under the Southern Cross” (University of Sydney Press, available through the University’s website).

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The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education have named Arizona State University’s Jane Maienschein the 2010 Arizona Professor of the Year. Maienschein, a Regents’ Professor and Parents Association Professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences, was selected from more than 300 top professors in the United States. Congratulations Jane!

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Ted McCormick’s (Concordia University, Montréal) book, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University Press, 2009) recently won the North American Conference on British Studies’ 2010 John Ben Snow Foundation Prize (for the best book by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century).

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Beginning on 1 January 2011, David Philip Miller will be Professor of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

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Eric Mills’ (Dalhousie University) The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet: How the Study of Ocean Currents Became a Science (University of Toronto Press, 2009) has won the Keith Matthews Award for 2010 of the Canadian Nautical Research Society as the best book of the preceding year by a Canadian on a nautical subject.

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Ron Numbers, who is the antithesis of indolence, announces several books that are coming out. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Science and Religion around the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), which was scheduled appear before the end of 2010; and Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank, eds., Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). The latter book is dedicated to Dave Lindberg and will appear in the spring of 2011.

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Donald Opitz (Depaul University) was named a 2010–2011 Faculty Fellow of the Humanities Center at DePaul University in support of his project, “At Home with Science: Domesticating Science in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” The fellowship provides a partial release from teaching, research assistance, and a budget for carrying out a community-engagement event connected with the project. See the blog inspired by his project: http://scienceparlor.wordpress.com

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Guy Ortolano’s (New York University) book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009) was named runner-up for the Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society. The jury called the book “imaginative and beautifully written,” and said that it demonstrates “masterfully both how much richer and how much more complex and contradictory than has commonly been supposed were the debates that C. P. Snow provoked with his 1959 address on ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’.”

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Maria M. Portuondo, (Johns Hopkins University) has won the John Edwin Fagg Prize from the American Historical Association in 2010 for her book Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (University of Chicago Press, 2009). This prize, which is in its final year, is given for the best publication in the history of Spain, Portugal or Latin America.

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Philadelphia microbiologist, James A. Poupard, Ph.D. has published A History of Microbiology in Philadelphia: 1880 to 2010 (see www.philamicro.com for details). It includes a comprehensive history of the early generation of Philadelphia bacteriologists and institutions in Philadelphia and traces the separation and evolution of bacteriology from other related disciplines.

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Peter J. Ramberg (Truman State University) was Visiting Professor at the Organic Chemistry Institute of the University of Zürich in September and October of 2010. He taught a four-week special course on the history of chemistry for the chemistry students entitled “Atoms, Elements, Structure, and Mechanism. Lectures on the History of Chemistry.” Details about the course are available online at: http://www.oci.uzh.ch/edu/lectures/short_courses/Ramberg/Ramberg.php

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This last August, Stephen Randoll accepted a position as Associate Professor of History at St. Charles Community College.

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Harriet Ritvo’s (MIT) Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History will soon be available from the University of Virginia Press. She is currently president of the American Society for Environmental History.

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Michael Robinson, (University of Hartford), will appear in the American Experience documentary “The Greely Expedition” on 31 January 2011 on PBS. He will also be giving the keynote address at the NASA symposium “1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight” at NASA Headquarters, Washington DC, in April 2011.

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Arturo Russo, who received the first HSS/NASA space history fellowship, will publish a paper based on his fellowship research, in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. The paper deals with the history of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission and it is slated for the spring issue of HSNS (vol. 41, no. 2, 2011).

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Joel S. Schwartz, professor emeritus of biology at City University of New York, had his book, Darwin’s Disciple: George John Romanes, A Life in Letters published by the American Philosophical Society (Lightning Rod Press), in July, 2010.

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Silvan Schweber (Harvard University) has won the American Physical Society’s 2011 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics. This Prize was established to recognize and encourage outstanding contributions to the history of physics. The citation that will appear on the certificate reads as follows:

“For his sophisticated, technically masterful historical studies of the emergence of quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics, and broadly insightful biographical writing on several of the most influential physicists of the 20th century: Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Bethe.”

The announcement of Dr. Schweber’s selection for the Prize and the citation will appear in the March 2011 issue of the APS News. A special page linked to the Prize and Awards page on the APS website will soon be created. For more information, http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/...

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Nancy G. Slack’s G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology (2010) is now available from Yale University Press. The Foreword is by E.O. Wilson.

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Carlos Solís’ new book, La Medicina Magnética: Del Ungüento Armario al Polvo Simpático de Kenelm Digby (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económca) will be available January 2011. Solís discusses the weapon salve and the sympathetic powder, and includes a translation of Sir Kenelm Digby’s Discours fait en une celebre Assembée... touchant la Guerison des Playes par la poudre de Sympathie. (356 pp, illustrations, bibliography, indexes)

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In 2010 Frank W. Stahnisch (University of Calgary, Alberta) received a 2010 Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The fellowship enabled him to visit the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he has continued his work on his book project, “The Making of a New Research Field: On the Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity in the German Neuromorphological Sciences, 1910–1945.” He has also recently become the President of the International Society for the History of Neuroscience, and in that capacity he is co-organizing the joint annual meeting of ISHN with Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences, to be held at the University of Calgary and the Banff Center for the Arts (June 16–23, 2011). For more information: http://www.ucalgary.ca/ISHN_Cheiron/

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George W. Stocking, Jr.’s (University of Chicago) Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in December 2010.

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Liba Taub, Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and Fellow of Newnham College, has been promoted to a personal chair at the University of Cambridge, and is now Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science. She has also been awarded an Einstein Foundation Visiting Fellowship. This award will fund her work with the Berlin-based excellence cluster “TOPOI: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations.” As an Einstein Visiting Fellow, she will make regular visits to Berlin to initiate research and coordinate work relating both to ancient scientific texts and to instruments, with the aim of establishing a lasting and productive collaboration.

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Leslie Tomory defended his thesis on the origins of the gaslight industry in 2009 at the University of Toronto. The dissertation has been accepted for publication by MIT Press and should be available in 2012.

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Jeremy Vetter has left his position at Dickinson College to become an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona.

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The Modern Language Association of America announced it is awarding its forty-first annual James Russell Lowell Prize to Laura Dassow Walls, (University of South Carolina) for The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, published by the University of Chicago Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book—a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography—written by a member of the MLA. The Prize was presented on 7 January 2011 during the association’s annual convention in Los Angeles.

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Jeff Weber’s An Annotated Dictionary of Fore-edge Painting Artists & Binders (Mostly English & American). Part II: The Fore-edge Paintings of Miss C. B. Currie; with a Catalogue Raisonné, is now available from Weber Rare Books (Los Angeles: 2010), designed by Patrick Reagh printers. This is the first book of its kind ever published, being an annotated dictionary of known artists & binders who are known to make fore-edge paintings, a field which is heavily dominated by anonymous artwork. Jeff’s grandfather Carl J. Weber wrote the last history of fore-edge painting, which went into two editions (1949 and 1966).

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Sheila F. Weiss’ (Clarkson University) book, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (2010) is now available from the University of Chicago Press.

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Jeffrey Wigelsworth’s (Red Deer College, Alberta, Canada) latest book, Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge, is now available from Ashgate.

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