New Books in the History of Science

I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey’s new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a gay identity and community to the new Russian state as it seeks to define its position vis a vis sexuality. With the Bolshevik revolution, revolutionaries decided to modernize Russian sexual science and beliefs. Russian sexual scientists were already in conversation with their Western European colleagues and sought to modernize and rationalize sexual relations between women and men. Policy makers introduced a number of reforms to aid in the process of modernization. They abolished the age of consent, for instance, and replaced it with an age of maturity. Bolsheviks also envisioned a modern role for science in the new Russian state – one that brought the psychiatrists into the justice system. These new sexual experts began to link sex crimes to mental disease, described and diagnosed sexual psychopathy, and they began a systematic investigation of the bodies of hermaphrodites. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics discusses these developments and their impact on sexual beliefs and the regulation of sexuality. Given the archival record, Healey does not attempt to predict how these changes influenced sexual experience. Court records, he notes, are largely silence on the impact that “modern visions” of sexuality had on young rape victims, for instance. Instead, Healey does what the records allow him to do: trace the changing role of sexual experts and sexual science of people of the young Russian nation tried to distance themselves from the old tsarist beliefs – yet lapsed over and over again into traditional notions of sexuality. Listen as Dan Healey tells us about his new book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of fossils in the light of evolutionary theory. Starting with Darwin and his dilemma concerning the fossil record, Sepkoski tracks the relationships between paleontology and evolutionary theory over the course of the twentieth century. As it was formulated at mid-century the evolutionary synthesis did not really allow paleontology to contribute to evolutionary theory and it fell to a self-consciously revolutionary generation of paleontologists in the 1970s to argue that reading the fossil record could change the theory of evolution. Drawing on increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling and simulating evolutionary processes, as well as on increasingly available computational power, paleobiologists built institutions and articulated ideas, such as punctuated equilibrium, mass extinction, and macroevolution, that demonstrated how the history of life revealed by reading the fossil record can amend evolutionary theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropology and in the work of Peter Galison, to explain the gradual breaking-down of the distinction between learned scholars and artist/practitioners as distinct and coherent entities in early modern Europe. Several kinds of trading zones, from the Vitruvian tradition to the physical spaces of arsenals and the city of Rome, provided common ground on which both practitioners and university-educated men came together to share ideas about substantive issues. As a result of this interchange, Long argues, empirical values that had been intrinsic to artisanal work came to be embedded more broadly in European culture, and categories that had initially been bifurcated (like art and nature) became more interchangeable. Long guides readers from a historiographical account of the idea of artisanal influence on the new sciences as it has emerged and developed since the 1920s, and through a series of engaging chapters that introduce works and figures that are crucial to the development of these ideas, including a wonderful account of the architecture of Rome from the pages of Vitruvius through the streets of a city dotted with obelisks and occasionally overcome with waters. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722). It focuses on the history of mathematics in this context, but situates the story of mathematics and Kangxi within a larger framework that extends from the late Ming through the years after Kangxi’s reign, and treating much more than mathematics in the course of the analysis.The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722) (Oxford University Press, 2012) takes us from the beginning of Western learning in China in the late Ming dynasty through the commissioning by Kangxi of a massive compendium that was the largest mathematical work ever printed in imperial China. Along the way, Jami’s work surveys the changing pedagogy of imperial mathematics in late imperial China, the crucial role that materiality and instruments played in the mathematics of this period, the many languages of sciences at the court, and the ways that Kangxi alternately used Jesuit mathematics to undergird his authority over Chinese scholar-officials, and sidelined them in the service of championing the mathematical knowledge of Chinese scholars and Bannermen. It is a rich and powerful account that rewards a wide range of readers. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the landscape of self-moving entities as actual and conceptual objects. He allows us a glimpse into the many ways that these categorical anomalies, as perennial figures in what we might think of as a cultural imagination, have helped shape some of the most influential work in the history of science, literature, and ideas. Kang also offers many chapters worth of fascinating examples in this carefully curated cabinet of wonders. In the course of our conversation, we also spoke about the particular joys and challenges of balancing the work of a historian with a concurrent career in fiction writing, and debated the benefits of being an AM vs. PM writer. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.”First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways. Taking a beautifully cinematic approach, Mialet guides us through a series of chapters that help us understand different aspects of the production of Hawking and HAWKING (the distinction becoming clear in the course of the book and the interview) by looking at the machines, bodies, inscriptions, images, and movements that constitute Stephen Hawking. Together, the chapters explore the productive tensions and co-creations of the collective and the individual. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet’s study uses a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say “he thinks”? What’s the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is “original” and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet’s work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, of prognostication and knowledge production, that delimited the conceptual space available to scholars of the stars and the innovative ways that they attempted to generate and secure astral knowledge. Building on his earlier identification of the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus’s ideas Westman shows how confession, patronage, friendships and university networks all factored into the many faceted appeal of Copernican ideas, illustrating the difficulty of identifying a single unitary Copernicanism in the three generations after the first circulation of Copernicus’s own ideas. Painstakingly researched, often to the point of tracing who had access to which copies of books (and their all important annotations) the book asks us to re-evaluate the scientific revolution in favour of more nuanced understandings of early modern scientific movements.Dr. Westman has written a precis of the book that can be found at the Montreal Review . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 is a study of the ways that early modern science traveled among localities and cultures and was constituted by those travels, focusing on the example of post-Copernican cosmologies. In the course of this fascinating study, Ben Zaken considers what it means to talk about “incommensurable” cultures, and champions the historical power of the mundane and the marginal. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism traces the composition, travels, and translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan as a way get at a history of debates about autididacticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, fourteenth-century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, and seventeenth-century England. This is an elegantly written and exhaustively researched world history of a single text on wildness, childhood, and nature, among many other themes that emerged and transformed in the very different contexts that the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan was studied and engaged.Since these two books represent parts of a coherent intellectual project in progress, we spoke about them in both in terms of the broader issues that underpin Avner’s scholarly work. We talked a great deal about the craft of historical writing. Topics ranged from the opportunities and challenges of working at different historical scales and bringing micro- and macro-history into the same project, to how academic training leads young historians to study local cultures in a particularly monadic way. It was a very stimulating conversation for me, and I hope you’ll enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices