Vol. 40, No.3, July 2011
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Member News
Quick Links....
Welcome to Cleveland
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Notes from the Inside
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News
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Conferences
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Member News
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In Memoriam
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A National Defense
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The Weisshorn, 1861 – 2011
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Jobs, Conferences, Grants
Joe Bassi (PhD, UCSB, 2009, Patrick McCray advisor) accepted a position in 2010 as an assistant professor of Arts and Sciences for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University/Worldwide campus. In this capacity, and because of his diverse academic background, he will be teaching courses both in the humanities and the sciences. He is also serving as the Associate Discipline Chair for Social Sciences and Economics.
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Nathan Crowe (University of Minnesota) will start a postdoctoral position this fall with the Embryo Project at Arizona State University's Center for Biology and Society.
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Lindley Darden (University of Maryland, College Park) and Carl F. Craver of Washington University in St. Louis received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant to support their joint HPS work on "In Search of Mechanisms: Strategies from Biology." Their goal is to complete a book manuscript on the topic, written for a general audience, by 2012.
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The International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) has award the Stafleu Medal to Jim Endersby of the University of Sussex for his book, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, 2008). The IAPT awards the Stafleu Medal triennially "for an excellent publication dealing with historical, bibliographic and/or nomenclatural aspects of plant systemics." The 2011 award ceremony will take place at the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne, Australia in July.
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Donald R. Forsdyke (Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario) is pleased to announce that following an introductory series of twelve 15-minute videos on evolutionary principles, a second series of 12 videos on Natural Selection is now available. This latest series deals with historical aspects of ideas on natural selection, with special reference to the complex interactions involving Charles Darwin, Patrick Matthew and Samuel Butler. The list of titles may be viewed at http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/videolectures.htm. The first video of the natural selection series, entitled "History and Words," may be viewed by going directly to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LPxHKPQ3SM.
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In August, Melinda Gormley will join Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values as the new Assistant Director for Research. With a 2007 history of science Ph.D. from Oregon State, Dr. Gormley was most recently a Visiting Assistant Professor in James Madison College at Michigan State University. At Notre Dame, she will provide overall direction for the Reilly Center's diverse and expanding research portfolio and will serve as the primary liaison to the Center's on- and off-campus research partners. She joins a leadership team in the Reilly Center that includes Director Don Howard, Assistant Director for Education, Edward Jurkowitz, and Katherine Brading, who directs Notre Dame's History and Philosophy of Science Graduate Program. For more information, see the Reilly Center website: http://reilly.nd.edu.
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Vladimir Karpenko and Ivo Purs have edited a new book, Alchymie a Rudolf II (Alchemy and Rudolf II), which recently appeared from Artefactum Publishers, Prague, in Czech. Contributors include J. Rampling, J. A. Norris, W. Eamon, R. W. Soukup, R. Prinke, R. Zandbergen and H. Hirai. Look for the English edition in coming years.
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Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science by Marjorie C. Malley will be published by Oxford University Press this summer.
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Rebecca Priestley recently completed her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She is the first person in New Zealand to complete a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from a New Zealand university. Her PhD thesis was Nuclear New Zealand: New Zealand's Nuclear and Radiation History to 1987, which she plans to publish in some form. She is also working on an anthology of Antarctic Science, a follow up to her award-winning 2009 book The Awa Book of New Zealand Science.
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The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States, by Heather Munro Prescott (Central Connecticut State University), will be available early this fall from Rutgers University Press.
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Leslie Tomory received a Mellon post-doc from McGill University, and will conduct research there from 2011 to 2013.
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Robert S. Westman (University of California, San Diego) is the Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington Library for 2011–2012.
New HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science
The History of Science Society is pleased to announce that Christine Yi Lai Luk is the 2011–12 HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science. Christine, a graduate student at Arizona State University, will be examining how China's biological rocketry program influenced the early institutional history of the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Science between 1949 and 1976. Her research will not only examine the links between nation-building and scientific discipline-building projects, but also the dynamics between the scientific community and the state in Maoist China.
The study will focus on biophysics, which, as a relatively marginal field within the Chinese Academy of Science, will provide a complement to scholarship on better-known aspects of Chinese space science. It aims to highlight how, from 1966 to 1976, biophysicists struggled under close government scrutiny, and also to show how state pressure to launch rockets carrying living organisms helped to legitimate biophysics as a discipline. Space science, Christine argues, is not simply a case of government patronage of science; rather, it is a neglected "missing link" in the broader attempt to understand the particular situation of science and scientists in Maoist China. The HSS looks forward to the results of this fascinating project.
ISHPSSB Awards Inaugural David L. Hull Prize to William B. Provine of Cornell University
At its meeting in 2011, the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology will award the first David L. Hull Prize. This prize will be awarded biennially to honor the life and legacy of David L. Hull (1935–2010), to an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies, and biology and that foster the careers of younger scholars.
The inaugural recipient of the David L. Hull prize is William B. Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University. Provine, whose teaching, mentoring, research, and engagement have won admiration and respect among biologists, historians, philosophers and social scientists who study biology, has an unflagging interest in getting others to appreciate the sciences he studies.
Provine's approach to the writing of history through close relationships with living subjects is especially striking. Provine's most celebrated relationship was perhaps with the late Ernst Mayr. Their co-edited collection The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology remains a classic. But the crowning achievement of Provine's scholarship was his monumental 1986 Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. This book reset the standard in scientific biography, and Stephen Jay Gould called it "the finest intellectual biography available for any twentieth century evolutionist."
Will Provine's work serves as a powerful reminder of the life and legacy of David Hull. The two were good friends, working to foster the interdisciplinary scholarship that is the mainstay of ISHPSSB. It is thus especially fitting that Will Provine is the first recipient of the David L. Hull Prize.
The prize will be awarded at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology. For the full prize citation, see the ISHPSSB listserv, http://www.ishpssb.org/listservontheweb.html.
J. E. McGuire Awarded Sarton Chair
In recognition of his lasting contributions to the History of Science, on Thursday 28 April 2011 Professor J. E. McGuire, professor emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science Department of the University of Pittsburgh), was inaugurated as Sarton Chair Holder of History of Science 2010–2011 by the Sarton Committee at Ghent University (collegae proximi: Professor Maarten Van Dyck and Dr. Steffen Ducheyne). Further information can be found at http://www.sartonchair.ugent.be/en/chairholder. Professor McGuire's two Sarton Lectures will be published later this year in a special issue of Sartoniana (http://www.sartonchair.ugent.be/en/journal).
Steffen Ducheyne Receives Human Sciences Award in Brussels
In recognition of his historical studies and philosophical-systematic analyses of the History of Science, in particular the history of physics, Dr. Steffen Ducheyne received the Belgian American Educational Foundation Alumni Award in the Human Sciences at Brussels on Friday 27 May 2011. Dr. Ducheyne is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Foundation (Flanders) and he is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science at Ghent University. His research focuses on the History of Scientific Methodology of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century physics. He is currently finishing a monograph on Newton's methodology, The Main Business of Natural Philosophy: Isaac Newton's Natural-Philosophical Methodology, which will appear shortly with Springer.
Further information: http://www.baef.be/documents/alumni-award.xml?lang=en.