Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2013
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Member News
Quick Links....
Notes from the Inside
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News from the Profession
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Upcoming Conferences, Meetings, and Events
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Job and Fellowship Announcements
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Member News
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From the HSS President: Making A Difference
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Article: The "Dinosaurs" Guide to Technology in the History Classroom
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Article: That Was Then. This Is Now
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Article: Reaching Beyond the Discipline
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Article: A Conversation with the American Historical Association's Jim Grossman, 4 October 2012
Janet Abbate (University of Maryland) published her new book Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing (MIT Press).
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Pnina G. Abir-Am was the first among the 2012-2013 crop of Resident Scholars at Oregon State University's SCARC (Special Collections and Archive Research Center) Program to deliver a lecture there, on 9-5-12. For more details on this Program, its report of Pnina's lecture in its Paulingblog of 11-21-12, and Pnina's own comments on that report click here.
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Lydia Barnett will begin a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of History at Bates College in 2013. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.
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Leo L. Beranek with co-author Tim Mellow is the author of Acoustics: Sound Fields and Transducers, Elsevier 2012. This book is both a college text and a reference book.
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Arthur W. Boylston (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Foster Court, University College London) has just published a book titled Defying Providence: Smallpox and the forgotten 18th century Medical Revolution. It is a history of variolation and shows that important medical tools such as controlled clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, and the concept of induced immunity were all driven by variolation.
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As of January 2013, Peter Byrne will serve a term as Writer-In-Residence at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His acclaimed biography, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, is now out in paperback (Oxford University Press). And Princeton University Press recently published The Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Collected Works 1955–1980 with Commentary, co-edited by Byrne and Jeffrey A. Barrett.
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Luis Campos has been appointed by the University of New Mexico as Assistant Professor of History and Senior Fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy. He comes from Drew University, where he was assistant professor in the History & Culture and Medical Humanities graduate programs, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2006. Campos is a historian of the life and environmental sciences, with a special interest in the history of genetics. He has most recently published an article in Biosocieties on the intellectual property dimensions of contemporary synthetic biology.
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Paul Cech has published a review of Michael Ruse's Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science in the November issue of Skeptic, Vol. 17 No. 3.
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Dawn Digrius (Stevens Institute of Technology) is the series editor for the history side of a new book series by Pickering and Chatto: History and Philosophy of Biology. She also has a contribution ("Botany: Early History") appearing in Michael Ruse's upcoming Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, Cambridge University Press, March 2013.
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Nathaniel Comfort (Johns Hopkins University) published his new book The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press) last September.
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Krishna Dronamraju (Foundation for Genetic Research) will be delivering a plenary lecture on the "Future of Biology" at the 100th anniversary meeting of the Indian Science Congress which was held in Kolkata, India, from 3 to 7 January 2013.
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Nahyan Fancy received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor starting July 2012 at DePauw University.
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Jacqueline Feke, a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, will spend the summer of 2013 as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
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Raymond Fredette (Université du Québec à Montréal) is preparing an annotated English translation of Galileo's De motu antiquiora, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. Fredette is also working with Francesco Furlan, from Les Belles Lettres, to create a bilingual Latin-French rendering of Galieo's early writings on motion, which will be a new edition of the Latin text. Both should be out in 2014.
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On 1 January 2013, Miguel Garcia-Sancho Sanchez became a Chancellor's Fellow at the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies of the University of Edinburgh (UK). He also published a book Biology, Computing and the History of Molecular Sequencing: From Proteins to DNA, 1945–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan).
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Robin L. Gordon (Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles) has a new book, Searching for the Soror Mystica: The Lives and Science of Women Alchemists, published by University Press of America, and slated to appear in April 2013.
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Judy Grabiner (Pitzer College) has been named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. The Fellows of the American Mathematical Society program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.
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Monica Green (Arizona State University) has been selected as Visiting Scholar at the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh for the academic year 2013-14. She is also part of a team that has just been awarded a $933,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for the development of digital editions of several key texts in medieval studies. She will be using her portion of the funds to produce a critical edition of the Antidotarium magnum, an 11th-century pharmaceutical compendium that first brought Islamic medical practices into the western world.
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Hans Haubold has co-authored "Space Weather Societal Impacts Workshop and Seminar at the Meeting of the United National Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space" (Space Weather, vol. 10, S11007, doi:10.1029/2012SW000874, 2012) and "The H-function" (Journal of Approximation Theory, vol. 164 (2012), p. 1323. The first article describes a workshop held in Vienna in June 2012 and the second article inspired an artist to interpret this hypergeometric function in an oil painting. He is also involved in the United Nations Basic Space Science Initiative, a long-term effort for the development of astronomy and space science around the world and especially in developing countries.
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Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University) has published a book The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (MIT Press).
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Frank A.J.L. James (The Royal Institution) has recently been elected a member of the Academia Europaea.
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John Krige (Georgia Institute of Technology) with co-author H. Rausch has a new book American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the Twentieth Century (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).
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Pierre Laszlo's second book on salt has been published. The new book is entitled Le sel pousse-t-il au soleil? (Does salt grow in the sun?). It was released on November 20th by Editions Quae, a publisher for public institutions responsible for oceanography, agricultural research, and the like. His first book on salt, which was also written in French, was later published in English by Columbia University Press as Salt: Grain of Life.
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Gildo Magalhães Santos (Cidade Universitária São Paulo) has published a new book: História e Energia: memória, informação e sociedade (Alameda, 2012).
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David P.D. Munns (City University of New York) has published his new book: A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy. His publisher is MIT Press.
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Naomi Oreskes' (University of California, San Diego) and Keynyn Brysse's research is featured in a recent Scientific American article (6 Dec 2012): "Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative" by Glenn Scherer.
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Kathryn Olesko (Georgetown University) was featured recently in the "Member Spotlight" of the AAAS. Go to http://membercentral.aaas.org/blogs/member-spotlight/kathryn-olesko-retraces-history-modern-lens.
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John Parascandola's (University of Maryland) new book, King of Poisons: A History of Arsenic has been published by Potomac Books Inc. in October 2012.
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Stuart Peterfreund (Northeastern University) published a new book Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin: The Way of the Argument from Design (Palgrave Macmillan).
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Rebecca Priestley published a book Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age (Auckland University Press). She also got a new position as a teaching fellow at Victoria University of Wellington.
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Joy Rankin (Yale University) is currently the IEEE 2012-13 Life Members' Fellow in Electrical History. Rankin is a candidate for the Ph.D. in the History Department at Yale University in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, and she is spending the current academic year as an Exchange Scholar with MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society. Her dissertation, supported by the IEEE fellowship, focuses on the transformation of computers from military, scientific, and industrial tools to personal tools by examining interactive computing projects which operated on time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s.
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Shawn Reeves will become chair of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Physics at American Association of Physics Teachers after their Winter Meeting in January. He is interested in exploring the pedagogical implications of an open discussion of philosophy in physics courses, as well as history's role in physics education.
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Peder Roberts' (TEUS) new book The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire has now been published. It is part of the Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series.
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Julia Rodriguez's (University of New Hampshire) article "A Complex Fabric: Intersecting Histories of Race, Gender, and Science in Latin America" in the Hispanic American Historical Review 91:3 (August 2011) has won the 2012 Best Article Prize from the New England Council on Latin American Studies.
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David Rosner's (Columbia University) and Gerald Markowitz' book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children will be published by University of California Press/Milbank Fund in 2013. It looks at the intense debates about low level exposures of lead and the new definitions of good science and questionable research on young African American children.
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Silke Fengler and Carla Sachse (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) have edited a new book titled Kernforschung in Österreich: Wandlungen Eines Interdisziplinären Forschungsfeldes 1900–1978. (Wissenschaft, Macht und Kultur in Der Modernen Geschichte, Band 1, Wien: Böhlau Verlag).
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Margaret Schabas (University of British Columbia) is the President-Elect of the History of Economics Society and will be hosting the annual meeting at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, 20-22 June 2013.
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David I. Spanagel (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) was chosen by the FHSA Steering Committee to be Ham Cravens' successor as the new Chair of the Forum for the History of Science in America.
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Frank W. Stahnisch (University of Calgary) was awarded the inaugural 2012 Mary Louise Nickerson Fellowship in Neuro-History by the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, Quebec, and he has also been reappointed in the Alberta Medical Foundation/Hannah Professorship in the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary, Alberta. His book Medicine, Life and Function—Experimental Strategies and Medical Modernity at the Intersection of Pathology and Physiology was published with Projektverlag (Bochum—Freiburg, Germany) this year.
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Roger H. Stuewer (University of Minnesota) has been awarded the 2013 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which was established by the American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics to recognize and encourage outstanding contributions to the history of physics. It consists of $10,000 and a certificate bearing the citation: "For his pioneering historical studies of the photon concept and nuclear physics, and for his leadership in bringing physicists into writing the history of physics by helping to organize and develop supporting institutions and publications." It will be presented at the APS meeting in Denver, Colorado, 13-16 April 2013, at a special ceremonial session.
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Alain Touwaide (National Museum of Natural History) has been elected Vice-President of the International Society for the History of Medicine (ISHM) for a 4-year term (2012–2016). He also has published two articles: one in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel and the other in Vesalius, the journal of the ISHM.
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Martha H. Verbrugge (Bucknell University) has authored a new book titled Active Bodies: A History of Women's Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2012). Further information about this book can be found online.
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Simon Werrett has been appointed to a new position in the Science and Technology Studies Department at University College London in the UK. He comes to London from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was associate professor in the Department of History. Werrett is currently studying roles that the history of science might play in the development of sustainable scientific research.
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Marilyn Wilhelm has published two new books in 2012: Returning To Our Roots (Paideia Press) and Reversing the Tower of Babel (Paideia Press). These books show how the Wilhelm interdisciplinary, intercultural, interlingual Ecumenical Curriculum weaves the arts, the sciences, and the humanities together and relates them to Universal Timeless Principles.
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Audra J. Wolfe's (University of Pennsylvania) book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America will be published in February 2013 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Adrian Wüthrich (University of Bern) has some forthcoming publications. His "Eating Goldstone bosons in a phase transition: A critical review of Lyre's analysis of the Higgs mechanism" will be published in the Journal for General Philosophy of Science. He'll also publish "Interpreting Feynman Diagrams as Visualized Models" in Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science. His "Locality, Causality, and Realism in the Derivation of Bell's Inequality" will be appearing in the Proceedings of "Current Interpretational Problems of Quantum Theory," as part of the Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge (Berlin).
Bibliography in the History of Science
Stephen Weldon, the HSS's Bibliographer, has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to hold a conference at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 2013. That conference will bring together a group of experts in international bibliography and digital humanities technology. The goal of the conference is to create a detailed plan for a new type of research tool—the "Isis CB 2.0"—that will allow historians of science easier access to information about both print and electronic resources in the discipline. By drawing on current ideas about collaboration and digital scholarship, it is hoped that this tool will be able to foster a new way of approaching research. It will feature visualization tools that will make networks of information and scholarship more accessible. In addition, social networking software will be integrated into the system to enable collaboration. In preparation for the conference, Weldon will survey the HSS membership on their use of the Isis CB, the HSTM database, and other popular research tools.
Weldon also met with fellow bibliographers and archivists in Athens, Greece, at the European Society for the History of Science conference this past fall to discuss online research tools in the international community. Gavan McCarthy (eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne), Birute Railiene (Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Library), Joe Anderson (American Institute of Physics), Ana Alfonso-Goldfarb and Márcia H.M. Ferraz (CESIMA, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) were the main participants. The international project World History of Science Online was the subject of several discussions. It is being developed to provide reliable updated information on scholarly digital resources.
HSS Interest Groups
Re-formation of the Early Science Forum of the History of Science Society
We are pleased to announce the re-formation of the Early Science Forum of the History of Science Society. The Early Science Forum highlights scholarship on the history of science, technology, and medicine from antiquity through the Renaissance. We seek to build connections among scholars of early science as well as emphasize the significance of their scholarship for the history of science more broadly.
We will convene a meeting of the forum at the next HSS meeting in Boston. Meanwhile, we are discussing potential initiatives and designing an online component of the forum to facilitate conversations among our membership. If you would like to join the forum—one need not be a member of the HSS to join—contact Courtney Roby (croby@cornell.edu) or Jacqueline Feke (jfeke@uchicago.edu) for further information.
Forum on the History of the Mathematical Sciences (FoHMS)
The Forum on the History of the Mathematical Sciences hosted a luncheon at the Society's San Diego meeting on Friday, 16 November 2012, which afforded lively discussion of matters of common interest to historians of mathematics. The twenty-one scholars—among them three graduate students who were first-time luncheon attendees—not only exchanged updates on their individual research projects but also brainstormed about possible session proposals for the next HSS meeting in Boston in 2013.
Now in its sixth year, FoHMS and its annual luncheons have been generously supported from the beginning by the Educational Advancement Foundation (EAF). It has been thanks to the EAF's generosity that FoHMS has been able to serve to encourage and increase the participation of historians of the mathematical sciences, in general, and of mathematics, in particular, at meetings of the HSS. FoHMS has also actively provided younger historians of mathematics and graduate students in the subdiscipline the opportunity to meet established scholars and to enlarge their circle of professional contacts. The EAF and FoHMS are committed to the idea that the history of mathematics represents a fundamental component both of the history of science and of the broader mathematical community and, so, should have a visible presence both at meetings of the HSS and at the annual joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, where it has long been established.
FoHMS maintains an e-mailing list of historians of the mathematical sciences and periodically sends reminders about HSS deadlines and other matters arising. If you would like to be included on that list, please contact Karen Parshall at khp3k@virginia.edu.
FoHCS Breakfast Meeting
The Forum of the History of the Chemical Sciences' Breakfast Meeting was held on 17 November 2012, during the HSS-PSA joint meeting in San Diego, California with 26 members in attendance. In this breakfast meeting, Seymour Mauskopf, Chair of FoHCS, introduced members of the Executive Committee present (John Powers, Alan Rocke) and Programs Committee (Robert Bud, Yoshi Kikuchi, Jenny Rampling) and mentioned the FoHCS-sponsored session, "Chemistry and the Public Sphere." He also mentioned the communication of Jeff Johnson (CHMC–Commission in the History of Modern Chemistry) to co-sponsor with FoHCS a session at the 2013 HSS meeting in Boston.
In the meeting, Mimi Kim suggested that FoHCS generate a registry of individuals and their particular interests in the history of the chemical sciences. This was deemed an excellent idea and will be pursued. The issue of a "succession plan" for the FoHCS Executive and Programs Committees was also raised:
Executive Committee: following the 2013 meeting, two of the four members will rotate off (including the Chair) to be replaced by two new members. A new Chair will be chosen from the remaining two original members. This procedure will be followed each successive year.
Programs Committee: following the 2013 meeting, one of the three members will rotate off (not necessarily including the Chair—to be Jenny Rampling for the coming year) to be replaced by a new member. This procedure will be followed each successive year.
Each committee is to have one graduate student as a fully participant member, to serve a term of one year.
New members (including graduate students) for each committee will be solicited from the list serv. Their selection will be handled by the combined Executive and Programs Committees. This is to insure balance (gender, geographical, field) in the committees.
Forum for the History of Science in Asia: Newly Designed Web site and Facebook Page
The Forum for the History of Science in Asia (FHSAsia) web site is now designed in a much more user-friendly form with new pedagogical resources at http://fhsasiahss.wordpress.com/. There is also now an FHSAsia Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/FHSASIA?ref=stream.
FHSA
I am the outgoing chair of the steering committee of the Forum for the History of Science in America. The new chair is David Spanagel at WPI. Our ongoing secretary-treasurer is Gwen Kay at SUNY Oswego. Both are excellent, well organized and motivated members. The Forum is lucky to have their services.
Our book award went to David Kinkela, SUNY-Fredonia, for his marvelous book, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide that Changed the World (University of North Carolina Press). Our distinguished lecturer was James R. Fleming, Colby College, who spoke on "At the Cutting Edge: Harry Wexler and the Emergence of Atmospheric Science." We had an audience of about sixty people.
For a number of years, Gina Rumore, a doctoral student at Minnesota, was the secretary-treasurer, and, also, the institutional memory of the Forum. We thanked her profusely in the meeting. Together with Gwen Kay, I worked out a sketch of my job description as chair of the steering committee as a step towards creating an institutional memory for the Forum. Now that Gina is no longer secretary-treasurer, we have to make sure the Forum functions smoothly. This was a step in that direction.
Hamilton Cravens
PSF
The Physical Sciences Forum met for the first time at the 2012 HSS meeting in San Diego. At this inaugural meeting, Catherine Westfall was elected chair and she selected Joe Martin and Greg Good to serve with her on the Steering Committee. At the meeting those assembled also laid out three plans for the next year, and identified committees to implement each plan. Greg Good is spearheading the effort for an annual meeting, the first to be held in spring 2013, that will provide an additional forum for early career scholars on the history of the physical sciences. With the help of Westfall, David Kaiser, and Suman Seth, PSF also plans to sponsor a Distinguished Lecture at the 2013 HSS meeting. At the meeting, the forum also plans a session that will discuss future directions in the history of the physical sciences. The associated committee members are Seth, Amy Fisher, and Don Howard.
The general aim of the PSF is to further scholarship in the history of the physical sciences as broadly understood, including but not limited to: physics; earth, space, and atmospheric science; astronomy; and materials science. It will help forge a more coherent community for those with a core specialty in these sub-fields with a particular emphasis on developing the connections linking these sub-fields and exploring their resonance with wider scholarship. For further information, contact Catherine Westfall at Westfa12@msu.edu.
Complementing the Forum will be a new Humanities and Social Sciences Net (H-Net) list, which will serve as a communication channel providing announcements, calls for papers, book reviews, and job postings in addition to promoting discussion about current research and the state of the field. For further information on H-Net, contact Joe Martin, mart1901@umn.edu.
In Memorium: Erwin N. Hiebert
1926—2012
Erwin N. Hiebert, (Emeritus Professor at Harvard University) passed away on 28 November 2012. A former president of the HSS, Professor Hiebert trained a generation of historians of science. He was preceded in death by his wife, Elfrieda. Both were fixtures at HSS meetings. A full notice will appear in a future Newsletter.