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Alchemy and a Vernacular Colour Code Spike Bucklow
This contribution considers the relationship between alchemy and European painting in the late Middle Ages. The most direct connection is in the synthesis of artists’ materials and the paper will draw upon recipes for making... More
Alchemy as the Art of Dyeing:The Fourfold Division of Alchemy and the Enochian Tradition Matteo Martelli
What is Graeco-Egyptian alchemy? Which kinds of techniques and craft practices does it encompass? And what were its goals? The paper addresses these questions by investigating the most ancient Greek alchemical texts preserved by... More
Allegoresis and Etymology in the Greco-Latin Scholarly Traditions Glenn W. Most
The paper will focus on two scholarly activities that can be interrelated but are not necessarily so: the etymological explanation of the alleged meanings of individual words, and the allegorical explanation of the alleged meanings of individual... More
Amateurs by Choice: Women and the Pursuit of Independent Scholarship in Twentieth-Century Historical Writing Gianna Pomata
The notable presence of independent scholars among women historians of the first half of the twentieth century is a phenomenon to be found in Anglophone, French, German and Italian historiography alike. In the European tradition, historical... More
An ‘Elusive’ Phenomenon: The ‘Normal’ Female Sex Drive Kirsten Leng
Beginning in the 1880s, inspired in particular by feminists’ challenges to the state regulation of prostitution, female sexuality became the subject of widespread scientific, social, and political interest as part of the broader “Woman Question.” ... More
Archimedes Exhibition Jürgen Renn
Department I has co-organized the exhibition "Archimedes. Art and Invention Science". The exhibition in the prestigious venue of the Capitoline Museums presents the great man from Syracuse to the wider public, illustrating his extraordinary... More
Archiving Indigeneity: Language Documentation and the Pragmatics of Decolonization Joshua Berson
Over the past 120 years, language has become subject to archiving. One consequence is that today, languages and linguistic diversity, like species of flora and fauna and biological diversity, are understood as scarce resources the conservation of... More
Aristotelization of the World Jürgen Renn, Helge Wendt, Sonja Brentjes, Matteo Valleriani
The ancient world and the societies that inherited part of its cultural patrimony witnessed the spread of a comprehensive, secular system of knowledge, which had long-term effects on the history of science: Aristotelianism. Aristotelianism eventually... More
Around Lomazzo: Artists’ education and the appropriation of knowledge in 16th C. Milan. Barbara Tramelli
The artistic scene in sixteenth-century Milan was incredibly dynamic and active, and a key-figure of the period was the Milanese painter Giovanni (Gian) Paolo Lomazzo. His writings (the famous Trattato, the shorter Idea del Tempio della Pittura, as... More
Art and Alchemy Sven Dupré; Steve Wharton; Anke Timmerman; Thijs Weststeijn
Giorgio Vasari in the mid-sixteenth century and later Karel van Mander in his Schilder-boeck (1604), portrayed Van Eyck as “a man who delighted in alchemy” whose experiments allegedly led to the invention of oil paint. The portrayal of the painter as... More
Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe Sven Dupré
This research group investigates how artists invented and appropriated knowledge, conceived and categorized knowledge, and transmitted and circulated knowledge in the visual and decorative arts in the pre-modern period.... More
Art, Natural Science, Local History and the New World in Counter-Reformation Antwerp: The Collection of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenes Sven Dupré; Sean Nelson
In collaboration with Christine Göttler (University of Bern) the project investigates one of the most splendid collections in early seventeenth-century Antwerp, that of the Portuguese merchant-banker Emmanuel Ximenes, a neighbor and contemporary of... More
Artefacts, Action and Knowledge Dagmar Schäfer
Professor Dagmar Schäfer, formerly of the University of Manchester, U.K., has accepted the directorship of Department III and will begin building up its research program on "Artefacts, Action and Knowledge" as of August 1, 2013. Department III will... More
Artists Inside Collections Sven Dupré; Sean Nelson; Marlise Rijks; Susan Maxwell; Valentina Pugliano
Apart from the oral communication between master and apprentice and written transmission, several types of material objects mediated the exchange of knowledge in the artist’s workshop. This project investigates the ways in which early modern artists... More
Artists’ Collections in the Early Modern Netherlands Marlise Rijks
While Early Modern Netherlandish painters were often avid collectors, up until now systematic research on artists' collecting is missing. Which networks did they use while collecting? What did they collect? Did their collections differ from other... More
Artists’ Optical Knowledge Sven Dupré; Klaus E. Werner; Marjolijn Bol
The artist’s ability to construct a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space on the basis of geometry was a powerful weapon in the battle for a higher intellectual status for the profession. However, while the contemporary... More
At the Front Door? - Women Scientists at the Humboldt University, 1946-1961 Annette Vogt
The project investigates the conditions female scientists faced at the Berlin University from its re-opening in 1946 to 1961. One of the questions it raises is whether the situation for women scientists improved after the deep setbacks women faced... More
At-Home Observation of Early Childhood Development in Gilded Age America Christine von Oertzen
This book project illustrates how members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), most prominent among them Milicent Shinn, a graduate of the University of California, engaged in the study of early childhood development. Their... More
Avantgarde and Psychotechnics. On the Convergence of Science, Art and Technology in the Russian 1920s. Margarete Vöhringer
In post-revolutionary Russia, life has become an experiment. The Russian Avantgarde took the new communist society as a quasi-artistic attempt and followed the formalist idea of "Art as a method" for visualization, trying to free the automated... More
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BRASS INSTRUMENT PSYCHOLOGY: TIMING – 1840-1940 Rand Evans
The term “brass instrument psychology,” a common term used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe laboratory psychology, shows the centrality of scientific instruments in the origin and development of experimental psychology. The... More
Between Knowledge and Innovation: The Unequal Armed Balance Jochen Büttner, Anette Schomberg, Dirk Rohmann
Id autem ex trutinis, quae staterae dicuntur, licet considerare. Pollio Vitruvius, ca. 20 v. Chr.In the course of this project, the development of the unequal-armed balance will be examined as a case study of an innovation process. The... More
Between Knowledge and Innovation: the Unequal-Armed Balance Jochen Büttner
In the course of this project, the development of the unequal-armed balance will be examined as a case study of an innovation process. The study will model this process on the basis of existing material evidence and will interpret it by... More
Between the Natural and the Human Sciences Lorraine Daston; Fernando Vidal
Questions about the histories of kinds of knowledge, evidence, and objects are common to all the sciences, from astronomy to psychology, from meteorology to sociology. Yet the natural sciences have received immeasurably more historical and... More
Beyond the Myth of Universal Space and Impenetrable Matter: The Overlapping Worlds of General Relativity and Quantum Theory Jürgen Renn ; Matthias Schemmel
This research activity concerns the transformation of the Newtonian concept of space in the relativity and quantum revolutions of the early 20th century. A first survey of the current epistemological situation in physics has revealed the crucial role... More
Big Science in the Archive: Managing Big Data in America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War Elena Aronova
In this project I examine the politics of world-wide data collection and data exchange in the age of Cold War To do so, I reconstruct the history of the World Data Centers in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and trace it from the organization of... More
Binding Media. Painting Techniques in Art, Science, and Industry in 18th and 19th Century Germany. Annik Pietsch
A painted image is perceived as a combination of forms, colors and materials. But it is also a three-dimensional object made of different layers of colouring matter and binding media on a support. On this material body, artistic perception,... More
Biodiversity, Saving Biodiversity: Expert Practices and Public Engagements in Conservation Biology Zoe Nyssa
Conservation biology is an unusual science in that it was founded on explicitly ethical objectives (e.g., Soule 1985); global biodiversity is considered to be a good in its own right and the study and protection of biodiversity itself a scientific... More
Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany Claudia Stein
In recent years scholarship on eighteenth-century German political culture has moved away from its fixation with national state formation and opened up new areas of investigation. Interestingly, the natural sciences and medicine have largely been... More
Birthing Machines – An Introduction to Ambulant Science Martina Schlünder
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, labour in Western medicine was understood as a mechanical procedure consisting of a regular sequence of seven fetal movements. At the beginning of the twentieth century the sequence was well known but the... More
Blood groups and the rise of human genetics in mid-twentieth century Britain Jenny Bangham
This project offers a new postwar history of human genetics, by examining how, in mid-twentieth century Britain, blood groups were made into objects for investigations into human heredity and diversity. It follows the collection of blood groups... More
Bourgeois Berlin and Laboratory Science Norton Wise;
Laboratory science, in the modern sense of laboratory teaching and research carried on at universities, only came into existence in the first half of the 19th century. The development occurred in all European countries but with quite different... More
Brownian Motion and Microphysical Reality c. 1900 Charlotte Bigg
In the years around 1900 scientific research became increasingly concerned with sub-microscopic entities, including atoms, molecules, ions, bacteria and all sorts of minute organisms. In different fields, scientists groped for ways of perceiving,... More
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Chemical Knowledge and the Armourers’ Art Alan R. Williams
The suit of plate armour appeared (uniquely) in Europe in the 14th century and remained in use for war and sport for three centuries. Armourers were not simply unlettered village craftsmen but systematic practitioners of applied... More
Chemical Technology and Epistemological Debate in the Works of Leonardo da Vinci and Vannoccio Biringuccio Andrea Bernardoni
During the Renaissance the field of the chemical arts was characterised by the complex identity of its protagonists, who would hardly recognize themselves in the traditional socio-cultural and professional... More
Chromatic Variations: Early Modern Practices of Color Amy Buono
This project will investigate the development and transmission of color-altering technologies in the early-modern Atlantic world, working with Berlin’s extensive South American ethnographic collections and... More
Cipriano Piccolpasso and the Transmutation of Matter Steve Wharton
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Circulation in Nineteenth-Century France: Blood, Water, and Railroads Nelia Dias
The term circulation was widely used in French urban planning from 1850’s onwards to designate the flow of people, goods, information, traffic, communication, water, heat, light, waste, and air. The aim of this project is to... More
Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Household Recipe Books in Early Modern England Elaine Leong
When Mary Cholmeley married Henry Fairfax in 1627, nestled amongst the possessions she carried to her new home in Yorkshire was a leather-bound notebook filled with medical recipes. Over the next few decades, Mary and Henry Fairfax, their children... More
Collective Observation Lorraine Daston
Natural philosopher Edmond Halley’s 1686 map of the world winds is emblematic of a new scientific predicament that emerged in the mid-17th century: how to coordinate, compile, and integrate the contributions of many different observers, scattered... More
Color Does Matter Karin Leonhard
This project concentrates on Baroque color theory and practice in the histories of art and science. It is based upon a cross-border cooperation between the disciplines of art history, the histories of science and philosophy, and museum restoration... More
Color in Nature and Color in Art Sven Dupré; Karin Leonhard; Tawrin Baker; Sylvie Neven; Amy Buono
"For the causes and essences of color are as disputed, and obscure to the intellect, as they are themselves manifest to sight."(Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericarum Exercitationum, 325.)Within the seventeenth century a huge... More
Concepts, methods, and the history of historical epistemology Jürgen Renn; Olaf Engler
In addition to the main research lines focusing on the long-term development and the global dissemination of knowledge, concepts and methods of a historico-developmental theory of knowledge are being designed and explored.Within this framework... More
Conditional Inequalities: American Pure and Applied Mathematics from the Cold War to the Present Alma Steingart
In my dissertation, I track the development of the American mathematical community in the decades following World War II. Mathematics is often presented as the most historically stable discipline whose methodology of proof and logical deduction dates... More
Contesting the ‘Laws of Life’: Sexual Science and Sexual Politics in the Early Twentieth Century Kirsten Leng
At the turn of the twentieth century, sex, its regulation, and its role in underwriting social order, were politicized as never before. Across Europe, existing ideological and legal frameworks were repeatedly undermined as a result of demographic... More
Continuity and epistemic developments of astronomical knowledge in the longue durée: The Sphaera-tradition Jürgen Renn ; Pietro D. Omodeo
For about 400 years, Johannes Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera was one of the most important texts of the European astronomical culture. The original text, written around 1230, was copied many times during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and... More
Crafting Splendor and Examining Light.The Artisan's Contribution to the Study of Optics, 1100-1700 Marjolijn Bol
This project investigates how the characteristic Northern fascination with splendor, created not only a fertile ground for crafts that in many ways afford luster and shine through polishing, faceting, forging and imitating refractive and reflective... More
Creative Natures. St. Joachimsthal, Goldsmiths and Metallogenesis Henrike Haug
One of the main metallurgical research interests of the Early Modern Ages was to discover how metals and minerals were formed. Another was to attempt to transmute one material into another by purifying components, disturbing their... More
Creative Niche Scientists: Women Educators in North American Museums, 1880-1930 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
Educational opportunities for women in the second half of the nineteenth century expanded their aspirations even as changing professional developments conspired to maintain men in authority. In the United States, women’s employment was most often in... More
Cultural Evolution and the Free Market: Hayek's Theory of Group Selection Naomi Beck
Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek was undoubtedly one of the most consequential thinkers in the twentieth century. He influenced leading economists such as Milton Friedman, as well as policy makers such as Margaret Thatcher, and his defence... More
A Cultural History of Breathing Oriana Walker
Familiar breathing—right under our noses—has at times followed and at times constituted the ever-changing boundary between what is considered “natural” and what is considered “human.” There was, after all, a... More
A Cultural History of Heredity Staffan Müller-Wille;
This project centers on the scientific and technological practices in which the knowledge of "heredity" was materially entrenched and in which it unfolded its effects. In this, knowledge of "heredity" is taken as something more than the scientific... More
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Darwin’s Images: The Visual Representation of Evolutionary Theory, 1830–1890 Julia Voss
The project investigates into the visual world surrounding evolutionary theory in the 19th Century. Although Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, his first publication on evolutionary theory in 1859, contained only one illustration evolutionary theory... More
Digital Edition of the Sources on Florence Cathedral: The Years of the Cupola Jochen Büttner
The Years of the Cupola represents a digital edition of the surviving administrative documentation in the historic archive of the Opera of Santa Maria del Fiore for the period 1417–36. The digital edition contains over 21,000 transcribed and analyzed... More
Drawing from Life: John La Farge, William James, and the Search for Truth in Art, Science and Philosophy Cecelia Watson
My current project explores the influence of the painter John La Farge on William James’s psychology and philosophy. James and La Farge studied painting together as young men, and these lessons fed James’s understanding of evolved intelligence and... More
Dream Watchers. A History of Modern Dream Research Andreas Mayer
This project aims to understand the rise of the scientific study of dreams in Europe and the U.S. after 1850. Whereas dreams have always been a troubling phenomenon for Western rationality, attempts at the systematic observation and control of the... More
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Embarking on a history of the Max Planck Society Jürgen Renn, Florian Schmaltz, Birgit Kolboske
To understand the fundamental and global changes in the modern world, a history of the twentieth century must acknowledge the tremendous impact of science and technology on political, economic, military,... More
Epidemiology, Chronic Diseases and the Risk Factor Approach since the 1920s: Shifts in our Concepts of Health and Disease Elodie Giroux
One of the main sources of contemporary issues around the definitions of health and disease is the importance of the “risk approach” to disease and of the notion of “risk factor” in medical thought and practice. This approach to diseases, introduced... More
Epistemic Change in the Discourse on Comets in the 17th Century. The Popularization of Knowledge in the Fields of Natural Philosophy, Astrology and Theology Anna Holterhoff
This project is a research on vernacular pamphlets and broadsides on comets in the 17th century. It aims at a reconstruction of the early-modern discourses on this issue over about a hundred years starting with the great comet of 1577... More
Epistemology and Aesthetics of Graphic and Photographic Inscription Dr. Peter Geimer
The project (March 2001–March 2004) dealt with the role of visual representations in the experimentalization of life. It focused on graphic and photographic recordings of the living, such as respiration, heart beat, voluntary and involuntary... More
Epistemology and Scientific Institutions Jürgen Renn, Florian Schmaltz
Institutions are means to reproduce the social relations existing within a given society and in particular the societal distribution of labor. With the separation of intellectual and manual labor, the production and transmission of... More
Establishing a new scientific institution in early modern Europe: The Italian Accademia del Cimento as a scientific network, intellectual dispositive and experimental entreprise Giulia Giannini
Scientific academies are undoubtedly a great institutional novelty of the second half of the 17th century. Even though their history has been well explored, the Accadema del Cimento still remains a desideratum for the history of... More
Eugenics and the Discourse on Reproductive Rights of African American Women in the Twentieth Century Anne Overbeck
From the very beginning, reproductive rights and thereby motherhood of African-American women have been subject to interference from the outside and a matter of public debate. During the time of slavery African-American women were seen as commodities... More
Excerpts versus Fragments: Deconstructions and Reconstitutions of the Excerpta Constantiniana András Németh
In the tenth century, Constantinople saw an overambitious project that attempted to unify available historical knowledge into a single, comprehensive, multivolume work of history. We call the scarce remains of this project Excerpta Constantiniana.... More
Exhibition Project on Art and Alchemy Sven Dupré
The Max Planck Research Group “Art and Knowledge in the Pre-modern Period” is collaborating with the Museum Kunstpalast on an exhibition on art and alchemy scheduled to open in Düsseldorf (as part of the Quadriennale) in April 2014. A... More
Experiment and Metaphysics - Connections between Natural and Cultural Sciences Sascha Freyberg
The so called 'hermeneutic circle' -- well-known in the humanities, is applicable to the natural sciences too. With the developments in modern physcis at the beginning of the 20th century, especially with quantum mechanics, this proved to be no... More
Experimental Systems and Spaces of Knowledge Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
The research activities of the department revolved around the practical, conceptual, and cultural conditions of scientifc innovation and the historical dynamics of scientifc change.  Research centered on the area of the life sciences... More
Extinction and the Value of Diversity David Sepkoski
This project is an intellectual and cultural history of extinction and biocultural diversity. Through my past research on paleontology, I have become aware of how closely scientific ideas about extinction have been bound up in discourses of... More
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Fluid Mechanics in Times of War: Research Practices interacting Politics, Industry and the Military Florian Schmaltz
This research project comprises a comprehensive institutional study about the history of the Aerodynamic Research Establishment (Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt - AVA) in Göttingen and its predecessor organizations (1907–1950).... More
Fluorophores and Electronic Imaging in Cell Biology, 1945-1995 Nancy Anderson
This project will foreground the tool of light in the history of molecular biology by offering an historical analysis of the coupling of fluorescence light microscopy and electronic/digital imaging from 1945-1995. Arguably the two most significant... More
Frederike van Uildriks (1854-1919). New Woman, Universal Savant and Popular Scientist in the Netherlands Mineke Bosch
In this contribution the focus is on Frederike van Uildriks as the author of an enormous and varied output of books and articles, literary reviews, comments and fictional stories, many but by large not all of these on subjects relating to ‘nature’,... More
From Cennini to de Mayerne: Artists’ Recipes for Painting Materials and Techniques, 1400-1650 Sylvie Neven; Mark Clarke; Karin Leonhard; Sven Dupré;
This project studies and reconstructs artisanal knowledge appropriated by artists through the close examination of one type of primary source: artists’ recipe books. One of the most famous examples of this sort of literature was, the Libro dell’Arte,... More
From Philology to Philosophy: Zhu Xi as a Reader Annotator Lianbin Dai
My project aims to reconstruct Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200) hermeneutic practice in his transition from philology to philosophy with a case study of his commentary on the Analects 1.1. As his commentary was an extension of his... More
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Gender Studies of Science Christine von Oertzen
Research on the history of women and gender in science, technology, and medicine has expanded considerably in recent years. The diversity and creativity of approaches in this field encourages Department II to... More
Gendered and Ethnic Knowledge: Mrs. J.M.C. Kloppenburg – Versteegh (1862-1948), an Example from the Dutch East Indies Around 1900 Liesbeth Hesselink
The project inspects domestic practices of recipe collecting and the transfer of medical knowledge in the colonial setting of the Dutch East Indies around 1900, where race, class, and gender come prominently into play. Hesselink analyses the... More
Generating Experimental Knowledge: Experimental Systems, Concept Formation and the Pivotal Role of Error Uljana Feest; Igal Dotan; Thomas Dohmen; Lambert Williams; Galina Granek
Experimentation, a core procedure of modern science, has received new attention in history and philosophy of science in the last two decades. While a wealth of new perspectives have opened up, however, one essential feature has remained largely... More
Globalization Processes of Knowledge Jürgen Renn, Matteo Valleriani, Helge Wendt, Sonja Brentjes, Jochen Büttner, Matthias Schemmel
Globalization is understood as the global or potentially global diffusion of any means of social cohesion, be it economic, political, technical, cultural, or epistemic. Globalization can therefore be traced back to the beginnings of human history.... More
Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions Aaron Tugendhaft
My project examines the scholarly use and adaptation of a cannonical list of gods from Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Syria. By focusing on the list as a component of the traditional scribal curriculum and its transformation into a structure for... More
Goldsmiths and Chymists: The Activity of Artisans within Alchemical Circles Lawrence M. Principe
Alchemy was a diverse and widespread endeavor in early modern Europe. It included not only a diversity of goals (e.g. metallic transmutation, pharmaceuticals, commercial productions) but also a diversity of practitioners... More
Greek Middle Class Women and the Transmission of Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Poly Giannakopoulou
This project is about women’s involvement in science in Greece during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when Greek universities at large had not yet developed into research institutions, and did hardly accept women as... More
A Guide Through Textual Practices in Late Renaissance Court Libraries: Hugo Blotius’ Catalogue De Turcis et Contra Turcas Paola Molino
My project investigates how a courtly space of knowledge, namely court libraries, shaped the textual practices related to the manuscripts and books preserved there. The organization of a library influenced not only the... More
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‘Health, vigor, and vitality within reach of all’: Radium Emanations and Male Sexual Debilities in Twentieth-Century America Maria Rentetzi
Maria Rentetzi’s contribution focuses on the early twentieth-century American marketplace where radium emanations were traded as medical remedies for male debilities, at a time when scientific explanations of sexual impotence in men were shifting... More
Heat and cold in observation and explanation of natural philosophers and scientists Arianna Borrelli
The modern concept of temperature would not have come to be without the thermometer. This statement can hardly be doubted, and it is not my intention to do so. However, the thermometer - both the device and its name - already existed at the latest in... More
High Performance in Elite Sports: A Cultural History of Medicine, Psychology, and Society during the Weimar Republic and Nazism Michael Hau;
Focusing on discourses about high performances in sports and work in Weimar and Nazi Germany, the project aims at a comprehensive cultural history of the notion of „performance“ (Leistung) in German culture, sports, medicine and psychology.from 1914... More
Historical Epistemology of Space Matthias Schemmel
In the history of Western epistemological thought, there is a long tradition of dividing spatial knowledge into a purely rational part, independent of any experience in the outer world, and an experiential part. While the project on the historical... More
Historical Epistemology of Space: Experience and Theoretical Reflection in the Historical Development of Spatial Knowledge Matthias Schemmel
The project aims at a long-term history of basic structures of spatial thinking, ranging from prehistory to the most recent and ongoing scientific revolutions. It focuses on the question of how the emergence and the development of spatial concepts is... More
Historical epistemology in action Jürgen Renn, Jochen Büttner
Science and scholarship in the humanities evolve as parts of a comprehensive system of knowledge.  External representations of knowledge such as language, writing, and new media such as the Internet are closely intertwined with this... More
History and anthropology of prematured babies care in post wwii’s france Olivier Thiery
After a dissertation concerning the “fabrication of existence of the subway”, my current project consists in following and going beyond these first anthropological and ontological interests, shifting in thematical space from technical organisms to... More
History of Statistics at the Berlin University and the Berlin School of Economics (Handels-Hochschule), from 1886 until 1945 Annette Vogt
In my recent research project I investigate the history of statistics at the Berlin University and at the Berlin School of Economics (Handels-Hochschule) from 1886 (1906 resp.) until 1945. I want to study the development of statistics in both fields,... More
Households of Knowledge: Reshaping the Scholarly Habitus, 1300-1600 Gadi Algazi
By the fifteenth century, prescribed Academic celibacy was eroding in northwestern Europe. Scholars moved out of the communal institutions, monasteries and colleges, which had hitherto shaped their daily lives and began founding family households.... More
How Reason Became Rationality Lorraine Daston
In the second half of the twentieth century, in the works of philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists, the faculty of reason was radically reconceived. In the models of game theory, decision theory, artificial intelligence, and... More
How Ritual Use Affects the Codification of the Canon: The Conception of Mantradevatā as a Classificatory System of the Vedas Paolo Visigalli
In this paper I investigate the relation between the ritual use made of the Vedas and their codification as canon. In doing so I want to highlight the importance of the concept of mantradevatā, ‘the deity who presides over the ritual formula’, as a... More
How our Days Became Numbered: The Development of a Statistical Infrastructure of Risk in the United States, 1873-1935 Dan Bouk
How Our Days Became Numbered explores the ways that life insurers in the second half of the nineteenth century struggled to extend their practices of risk—their techniques for understanding the world and its inhabitants—across the... More
How to Make Microbes Travel. Bacteriological Knowledge Transfer to and within Poland, 1885-1939 Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen
The PhD-project analyzes media and techniques of knowledge transfer in medical bacteriology. It explores how texts and pictures as well as the circulation of people, objects and animals were employed in order to mobilize the newly developed field of... More
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Ideal of Proof: Forensic Knowledge Between Theory and Practice in Late Imperial China Xin-zhe Xie
In China, if the codified integration of autopsy into the procedure of criminal investigation can be traced far back to the dawn of the imperial era, in third century B.C.E, it was in thirteenth century that the earliest surviving... More
Ideals and Practices of Rationality Lorraine Daston
Department II studies the history of scientific reason. Its topics are categories, concepts, and practices that are fundamental to modern science and culture – so fundamental that they seem to transcend history. Examples include the division... More
Illuminating the « Elusive »: Organic Colorants in Northern European Illuminations Sylvie Neven
Due to their trade value, a huge range of artistic materials were documented and recorded in historical written sources. However, other substances had no market value and therefore cannot be found in these archives. This is especially the case for... More
Imperial Systematization of the Past: Textual Practices and Canon Formation at the Byzantine Court András Németh
The purpose of my research is to reconsider the improved textual practices of the mid-tenth-century Byzantine imperial court and to analyze how these activities were linked with the imperial renewal of historiography. With a huge investment of... More
Inimitable Sources: Rhetoric and Canonical Texts (Homer, the Qur'an and the Bible) Filippomaria Pontani
Following on my work concerning the rise of grammar from canonical texts in different linguistic areas, I propose to investigate the role played by Homer, the Bible and the Qur'an in the shaping of the respective rhetorical traditions. As a... More
Innovations in Indian Mathematical Astronomy Kim Plofker
The aim of this project is to clarify the approaches employed by Indian mathematician-astronomers to develop innovations in their traditional models and practices.  The default historiographic assumption, heavily... More
International History of the Atomic Monopoly Michael D. Gordin
This project focuses on three crucial dates in 1949: 29 August, 3 September, and 23 September. On 29 August, the Soviet Union detonated their test bomb — and then did nothing. The Americans had no idea that anything had happened. On 3 September,... More
Introspection in Victorian Political Economy Harro Maas
In earlier work I have looked in some detail at the quite drastic change in methods in political economy in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of my main messages was that an economic practice taking mechanical... More
Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Polio Epidemics in Cold War Hungary 1952 -1963 Dora Vargha
The dissertation concentrates on the politics of polio epidemics in Hungary as they reflect on international public health policies, professional and familial roles, and concepts of bodily production. The project cuts across disciplines, entwining... More
Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI) Lorraine Daston
Member Institutions of the ISMI Board: Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, Aga Khan University, London, U.K.; Archimedes Project, Harvard University, U.S.A.; Filologia Semítica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain ; Encyclopaedia Islamica... More
Islamicate Transformations of Knowledge Sonja Brentjes, Jürgen Renn
Islamicate transformations designates a broad variety of processes of change that scholars, artisans, courtiers and civil as well as military rulers brought to the knowledge and its practices in the... More
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Johann Buxtorf Makes A Notebook Joanna Weinberg; Anthony Grafton
In the Renaissance, as in earlier periods, scholars often mastered new fields by working through a body of sources, making excerpts from them and filing them under topical headings in commonplace books. Johann Buxtorf (1564-1629) was the most... More
Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’ Mathew Hunter
First President of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts and eminent theorist of Augustan aesthetics, Joshua Reynolds was an inveterate chemical experimenter. Using a secretive laboratory of varnishes, waxes and fugitive pigments,... More
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Knowledge on the Move: Scientific Encounters in the Muslim and Christian Worlds, 500-1500 Katharine Park
This project, which is based on a course Ahmed Ragab and I co-teach in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, will yield a co-authored book for the use of students and non-specialist scholars.  This will  present... More
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Laboratory Landscapes. The Alps as a Medium of Physiology around 1900 Philipp Felsch
The dissertation project "Laboratory Landscapes. The Alps as a Medium of Physiology around 1900" aims at the historical encounter of experimental physiology and alpinism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is centered around two main... More
Landscapes of Experimentation: Heredity research in Early Twentieth Century Germany Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
My current research focuses on a number of case studies designed to map the development of experimental genetics in Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. The general aim of the project is to look at... More
Leibniz in the Harz: History, Invention, and the Archives of Nature André Wakefield
My project explores the shifting boundaries of the human and the natural toward the end of the seventeenth century. I will focus on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote both human and natural histories. Leibniz, official historian for the House... More
Lieder Migrations Laura Turnbridge
Funded by fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this book project investigates Lieder performance between the World Wars. Migration is a key theme, considered from two perspectives: first, the traffic... More
Listening Techniques in Post-Reformation Geneva: Evidence from the Registers of the Consistory (1542-1555) Anna Kvíčalová
The objective of this research project is to investigate new modes of preaching, listening and remembering as they appear in mid-16th century Geneva in the context of religious reform. In this respect the consistory of Geneva – its church discipline... More
Listening to the Domestic Music Machine: The Keyboard Arrangement in the Nineteenth Century William Lockhart
The keyboard arrangement – an adaptation of a large musical work for performance at the home piano – was central to both the performing and listening habits of the nineteenth-century amateur musician.   Not only did it respond to the... More
Long-Term Development of Mechanical Knowledge Jürgen Renn, Matteo Valleriani
Mechanical knowledge is characterized by the continuity of its tradition from antiquity until the time between the end of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century when preclassical mechanics prepared the background against which modern physics... More
Long-term development of knowledge Jürgen Renn; Matthias Schemmel
The history of scientific knowledge is characterized by recurrent phases of fundamental conceptual reorganization involving genetically related but mutually incompatible conceptual systems. At the same time, certain knowledge structures show a... More
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Making Sense of Suetonius in Twelfth Century England Robert A. Kaster
In my project I consider the approaches that two readers of the twelfth century took to the Lives of the Caesars (De vita Caesarum) by the Roman author Suetonius (ca. 69-130 CE). Like many other works of literature and history transmitted from... More
Maryādām Ullaṅghya: the boundaries of interpretation in early modern India Christopher Minkowski
In the early modern period the principal arena for intellectual dispute for Brahminical thinkers writing in Sanskrit was the proper interpretation of the canonical literature of the Vedānta. It was agreed by the many contesting positions that these... More
Material and Temporal Powers at the Casino San Marco (1574-1621) Marco Beretta
Built in 1574 by court engineer and architect Bernardo Buontalenti for Francesco I de Medici, the Casino San Marco represents a unique example of a late Renaissance site of alchemical research, art collecting and policy court... More
A Matter of Time: Changing Clock Habits in Edo Japan Yulia Frumer
The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Yet glancing at mechanical clocks designed in a culture remote from us in both time and space we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to... More
Medical Demography in Colonial Central Africa. Measuring and Negotiating Health, Reproduction and Difference, 1918-1945. Samuël Coghe
This project examines the role of medical doctors in the production and circulation of demographic knowledge and ideas about human variation in three contiguous Central African colonies: the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Angola... More
A Medieval Coptic Hebraism? Coptic Adaptations of Saadiah Gaon’s Judaeo-Arabic Translation of the Torah, Their Transmission and Textual Practice Ronny Vollandt
In the framework of the learned textual practice working group I will examine Saadiah’s Tafsīr, an Arabic translation of the Pentateuch of originally Jewish provenance, became a foundational text also of the Coptic Church, whose study and... More
Miscellaneous Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
For the invidivual projects by current scholars-in-residence see the list on the right hand side. More
Modern Geometry and the Concept of Space Vincenzo de Risi
Although a divide between ancient and modern geometry can be framed in different ways, the most useful one may well be the emergence of the consideration of space itself as an object of geometrical investigation.Greek mathematics understood geometry... More
Moral Entanglements: The Emergence and Transformation of Bird Conservation in Great Britain and Germany, 1790-2010 Stefan Bargheer
In a best-selling book on his hunting expeditions in East Africa, first published in 1903, Carl Georg Schillings lamented the decline and extinction of wild animals. In Schillings’ view, something had to be done immediately. “I want to raise my... More
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Narratives of Isolation. Studies of Human Variation Between the Paradigms of “Race” and “Population” Veronika Lipphardt
In the early 1950s, geneticists and physical anthropologists recognized their professional dilemma. On the one hand, they still found it important to study human biological variation empirically, and even more so in the light of the new... More
A Natural History of Data David Sepkoski
A Natural History of Data examines the history of practices and rationalities surrounding data in the natural sciences between 1800 and the present. One feature of this transformation is the emergence of the modern digital database as the locus of... More
A New Paradigm: the "Digital Scrapbook" Jürgen Renn; Jochen Büttner; Robert Casties; Dirk Wintergrün
Electronic tools as they are currently available cover and support almost the entire scholarly workflow, from the identification of historical sources to the publication of their interpretation. At present, this workflow is,... More
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Obscurity as Textual Practice Ineke Sluiter
The textworkers in the Greco-Roman tradition, who guarded, preserved, transmitted, and explained their canonical texts needed a reason (or at least a justification) to interfere in the texts that they considered... More
Open Access Publications Lindy Divarci, Jörg Kantel, Jürgen Renn, Simone Rieger, Matthias Schemmel, Kai Surendorf
Databases, digitized historical sources, computer-based tools for their analysis, as well the network of links integrating them with scholarly interpretations play an important role in a history of science that increasingly... More
Open Access Research Infrastructure: European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) Robert Casties; Simone Rieger; Jürgen Renn; Urs Schoepflin; Dirk Wintergrün
In 2002 the initiative “European Cultural Heritage Online” (ECHO) was established to create a research driven infrastructure for the humanities. In cooperation with the MPIWG library, part of the ECHO infrastructure is dedicated to the installation... More
Outreach activities Jürgen Renn
Members of Department 1 make use of a broad spectrum of formats to communicate the history of science not only to experts but also to the interested public, among them smaller and larger exhibition projects.    ... More
Overland to Lobito Bay: The 1925 Scientific Expedition of Dorothea Bleek and Mary Pocock Vanessa Agnew
In 1925, Dorothea Bleek and Mary Agard Pocock mounted a seven-month expedition, which took them from Cape Town, north by rail to the Victoria Falls, then by foot and palanquin—a mode of transport popular among colonial officials—through Zambia,... More
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Performing Experiment Otto Sibum
Historians of science have repeatedly argued that the concrete process of working in a laboratory or workshop can usually only be recovered with difficulty and incompletely from historical texts and illustrations. Illustrations in scientific... More
Perspectiva+ Klaus E. Werner
In collaboration with the Biblioteca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome the research group is developing a digital platform [Perspectiva+] for the history of optics and its various appropriations in the decorative and... More
Physics at Work: Experiment and the Knowing Body of the Scientist Otto Sibum
Over the last decade, historians of science have shifted their attention to look beyond official texts. Aspiring to understand what scientists did and not merely what they have written, they have drawn attention to the silent witnesses of the past:... More
Physics circa 1900 Richard Staley
This project seeks to deliver new perspectives on the material, conceptual and disciplinary foundations of physics in the period from 1870 to the 1920s. A primary focus (and the subject of a book manuscript in preparation) is a new account of the... More
Picturing Number: Visualizing Quadrivial Concepts in the Central Middle Ages Megan McNamee
Education changed in the central middle ages. While the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic continued to be taught as the foundation of all learning, the quadrivium, the four arts of number—arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy—received new... More
Picturing as Practice: Placing a Square above a Square in the Central Middle Ages Megan McNamee
This essay examines the many pictures of solids added to the margins of Macrobius's fifth-century Commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio in light of contemporary geometric practice around the turn of the first... More
Practical Knowledge Traditions and Scientific Change, 1750 - 1870 Otto Sibum
The project focuses on a historical period in which modern science took shape, a period of critical importance for exploring the fruitful interactions between science and other forms of knowledge. It spans the period from the mid-eighteenth to the... More
Practices and Paths of Rationality in 18th Century Naples Francesco de Ceglia
The aim of my research is to shed light on the way in which 18th century science examined a particular category of miracles which were very common in the Kingdom of Naples in the modern age. These are the so-called... More
Practices of Natural History in the 18th Century Mary Terrall
This study examines the various and sundry practices that went into making natural historical knowledge in francophone 18th-century Europe. Through diverse manuscript letters, research notes and drawings, as well as printed texts and engraved... More
Practices of Observation of Early Modern Physicians Gianna Pomata
My work focuses on the practices of observation of early modern European physicians. I examine in particular the development of the genre of medical observationes (collections of case-histories), a new form of writing that emerged in the late... More
Pratolino: The History of Science in a Garden Matteo Valleriani; Jochen Büttner
The Garden of Pratolino, located twelve kilometers from Florence on the slopes of the Apennine Mountains, was created during the second half of the XVI century at the command of Grand Duke Francesco I de Medici under the supervision of his chief... More
Principles and Problems: Constructions of Theoretical Physics in Germany, 1890-1933 Suman Seth
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Rationality in Psychology and Philosophical Naturalism Thomas Sturm
Philosophical naturalists claim that we should use empirical psychological knowledge for answering epistemological questions. Critics usually object that naturalistic epistemology is limited by the existence of apriori knowledge, or by the... More
Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe Elaine Leong
Since the introduction of Gutenburg’s invention of movable type, medical and scientific ideas have circulated in printed books, journals and pamphlets. Medical print not only allowed academics and medical ‘professionals’ to exchange and discuss new... More
Reading for Cures in Early Modern England Elaine Leong
Reading for Cures investigates medical print production and medical reading in early modern England. On the book production side, it adds to the current literature by focusing on two crucial areas: medical translations and household medical guides.... More
Refutata per ignem: The Evidence for the Use of Thermal Analysis in 17th century European Ceramic Innovation Morgan Wesley
While the interaction of clay and fire in the kiln is integral to the ceramic process, the 17th century saw the inclusion of a new permutation of that elemental relationship. In the quest to develop European porcelain,... More
Reliable Books: Islamic Law, Canonization and Manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire (16th-18th Centuries) Guy Burak
My project explores the emergence of an imperial jurisprudential canon in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. It examines the ways in which the Ottoman dynasty regulated the circulation and reading of a specific textual corpus. In... More
Reorganizing Knowledge in Modern Science Jürgen Renn
The goal of the project is the study of the emergence and transformation of core groups of concepts that structure the vast knowledge embodied in the mechanical worldview as a result of processes of knowledge integration and disintegration. In the... More
Reorganizing Knowledge in the Life Sciences Jürgen Renn; Olaf Engler
A group of studies analyzes conceptual transformations within the life sciences under analytical and historiographical perspectives similar to those of the research project on the reorganization of physical knowledge. They aim at understanding the... More
Reorganizing physical knowledge through philosophical reflection Olaf Engler; Jürgen Renn
Specific studies are focusing on the fruitful interaction between the philosophy of science and the development of modern physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the discussions between Albert Einstein and Moritz... More
Rival Theories of Aerofoil, 1904 - 1926 David Bloor
By the time of the First World War of 1914-18 the aeroplane had become established as an effective and vital piece of technology. Its practical success and potential were beyond doubt but flight posed deep scientific problems. How does a wing... More
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Scandalous Subjects: Island Lives and Demographic Anxieties from Race to Development in Melanesia Alexandra Widmer
This project is an ethnography of the scientific practices of counting human populations and the anxieties engendered by the futures that the numbers forecast.  It is an account of the Melanesian modernities... More
Science and Technology in Italian Literary Journals, 1945-1967 Donatella Germanese
This project investigates science and technology as topics dealt with in literary and cultural journals published in Italy after World War II. Absolute faith in scientific progress and the accusation of dehumanizing people and... More
Science and the Changing Sense of Reality, 1870 - 1920 Otto Sibum
The turn of the twentieth century is usually described as a crucial moment in the history of the physical sciences. One especially striking issue is the increasing number of techniques for investigating microphysical objects, with x-rays, electrons... More
Science and the Senses: Experience and Observation in Medieval Europe Katharine Park
This book will extend the work I did for an article, “Observation in the Margins, 500-1500,” which was commissioned for Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). In that... More
Science for Women in the Spanish Country House (1780-1808) Elena Serrano
My project focuses on the role of women and gender in economic agriculture, a broadly defined science that encompassed agricultural knowledge, botany, chemistry, healing practices, domestic economy, artisan skills, and rural architecture. My aim is... More
Science in Circulation: The Exchange of Knowledge among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, 9th-17th Centuries Lorraine Daston
Commodities, ideas, facts, instruments, texts, techniques, and people all travel – but selectively. Knowledge, both implicit and explicit, does not spread simply because it is true or useful; nor do the paths it takes cover the globe. The “Science in... More
Scientific Observation as a Tool for Conservative Social Reform Theodore Porter
This project examined the méthode d’observation of the mining engineer and prominent conservative Frédéric Le Play, who began his career emphasizing careful observation as a tool of economic planning and management, and later exalted it as an... More
Seeing Structure, Structuring Sight: Bénard’s Cells and the Visualization of Self-Organization David Aubin
Henri Bénard was a French physicist who performed experiments on fluids for a Collège de France physics course given by Marcel Brillouin at the turn of the century. Bénard was among the first to study the behavior of a thin layer of liquid, about a... More
Shaping a Family Practice in Twentieth-Century Rural America Constance Putnam
The tradition of rural general practice is strong in the United States. Even in the middle years of the twentieth century, many rural doctors worked out of offices in their homes and routinely made house calls. Domestically based rural medicine has... More
Source repositiories, virtual Research Environments and new forms of dissemination Jochen Büttner; Jürgen Renn
New media and the Internet have facilitated new modes of cooperation and new forms of publishing scholarly data and results. Against this setting, the idea of an Epistemic Web has emerged. Ideally, the Epistemic Web of the future... More
Spatial Thinking and External Representation Matthias Schemmel
The working-group volume Spatial Thinking and External Representation: Towards a Historical Epistemology of Space documenting the research group’s results is currently in preparation. It contains the following contributions:“The Historical... More
Spoken Word Theatre and the Architects of Sound, 1750-1930 Viktoria Tkaczyk
The project is dedicated to exploring the links between the history of European spoken word theatre and acoustics from 1750 to 1930. This period corresponds to the gradual establishment of acoustics as an academic discipline and its differentiation... More
Strangelovean Sciences Paul Erickson
My work explores the development and spread of mathematical theories of rational choice – especially game theory – since the Second World War. Much work to date has focused on the role of state (especially military) patronage in this process, and... More
Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge Jürgen Renn
The work of the department is dedicated to understanding the historical processes of structural changes in systems of knowledge. This goal comprises the reconstruction of central cognitive structures of scientific thinking, the study of the... More
Studies of Science Before “Science Studies”: The Cold War and the Politics of Science in the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R., 1950s-1970s Elena Aronova
This project investigates the history of Science Studies (or Science and Technology Studies, STS) as it became a distinct area of expertise and academic inquiry during the Cold War. I pursue five distinct stories, or case-studies, each focused... More
Surveying Nature in Central America, 1770-1840 Sophie Brockmann
My research concerns networks of scientific knowledge in Central America in the late-colonial period and beyond. My PhD dissertation ‘Surveying Nature: The Creation and Communication of Natural-Historical Knowledge in Enlightenment Central... More
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Taking „Nature’s path“ in Eighteenth-Century Britain Anne Secord
The project examines how eighteenth-century imperatives to follow nature actually operated in practice. By considering processes not susceptible to quantification but that signaled a mastery of nature, the historian has to think more... More
The Adolescent Daydreamer: Experimental Investigations of Inner Experience from Late-Nineteenth Century Psychology to Twenty-First Century Cognitive Neuroscience Felicity Callard
Stanley Hall, in his famous 1904 monograph on adolescence, argued that “inner absorption and reverie is one marked characteristic of this age of transition”. “The Adolescent daydreamer” project is investigating how the adolescent has been configured... More
The Anthropocene Project Cecelia Watson
The Anthropocene hypothesis proposes that with the invention of James Watt’s steam engine, the earth entered a new geologic era characterized by an unprecedented level of human intervention in natural processes. If man makes nature rather than being... More
The Bibliophile Qi Chenghan: Book Consumption and Commercialization in Late Ming China Cathleen Paethe
This project deals with one of the largest private library Dansheng tang of Qi Chenghan (1565–1628) in Shanyin of the Late Ming period (ca. 1550–1644). Private bibliophiles had become a common phenomenon in the Late Ming era's commercialized world... More
The Birth of Gender: Medicine and the Search for the Better Sex Sandra Eder
The concept of “gender role” was coined in the early 1950s at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. In a set of five publications, co-authored with psychiatrists Joan Hampson and her husband John Hampson and published between... More
The Canon under Threat: Objects without Status and Processes of (De)canonisation of Middle Eastern archaeological Finds in 19th century Europe Mirjam Brusius
My project investigates the potential of archaeological objects excavated during European expeditions in the Middle East as raw material for scholarly activity and their visual registration in the 19th century. Taking... More
The Construction of Deafness in Western Europe and the United States (17th to 19th Centuries) Sabine Arnaud
Sabine Arnaud studies the construction and diffusion of medical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge on deafness to consider how an infirmity was constructed simultaneously with different areas of competence designed to attend to and possibly... More
The Construction of Norms in 17th- to 19th-Century Europe and the United States Sabine Arnaud
This research group works on deafness, hysteria, and contagion from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century as three sites of conflicting new conceptions of the human. In medicine, literature, education, and... More
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) Peter Damerow († 2011) ; Jörg Kantel ; Christina Tsouparopoulou ; Luděk Vacín
The CDLI is a common initiative of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the MPIWG. On the websites of these institutions, more than 230,000 of the estimated more than 500,000... More
The Database of Dreams: Social Science’s Forgotten Archive of How to Be Human Rebecca Lemov
This project tells the story of a vast yet almost entirely forgotten archive. Built in 1955, it holds the collected records of people’s inner lives: their dreams, their life histories, their psychological test results, and even their... More
The Finale of Antiquity: The analytic turn of mechanics between traditional models of thought and claims of autonomy. Christoph Lehner, Helge Wendt
The project deals with the transformation of antique concepts in mathematics, mechanics and theory of heat after the rise of classical physics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the interplay of theory and praxis.... More
The Globalization of Science in the Modern World Helge Wendt, Jürgen Renn
The globalization of knowledge today has reached another level with new potentials emerging, such as the global system of science and the World Wide Web. The migration of scientific knowledge is no longer characterized by the trajectories of... More
The Government of Techno-Science and Techno-Products at Global Level Dominique Pestre
My current research project deals with the government of techno-sciences and techno-industrial products at various scales since the second world war. This is a collective project (six senior people and a dozen post-doctoral and doctoral students)... More
The History of Quantum Gravity Research Alexander Blum; Jürgen Renn; Matthias Schemmel
The project was established with the aim of studying the borderline problems at the interface of quantum theory and (general) relativity, which began to capture the attention of physicists after those two theories had emerged from similar conceptual... More
The Laboratories of Art and Alchemy at the Uffizi Gallery in Renaissance Florence: Some Material Aspects Fanny Kieffer
The Uffizi, emblematic monument of the Florentine Renaissance, are still, in spite of their fame, oddly unknown. Considered as the ancestor of the European museums, they were built by Giorgio Vasari to cater for Cosimo I’s public... More
The Laboratory in the City: Urbanization, Industrialization, and the Place of Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Physiology Sven Dierig
Laboratories are not isolated from the world; they have always existed in relation to the space around them. Like universities, museums, hospitals, botanical gardens, and other institutions of scientific research and education, laboratories have been... More
The Making of Acoustics in 16th to 19th Century Europe Viktoria Tkaczyk
The 16th to 19th century represents a period that corresponds to a series of fundamental findings in acoustics. The aim of this project is to show, however, that the history of acoustics is not limited to the emergence of an exact science, but must... More
The Mediterranean World in Post-Antiquity Jürgen Renn, Matteo Valleriani, Helge Wendt
The research activity is dedicated to globalization processes in the premodern era. Such processes deal with the vehicles, networks, and mechanisms of knowledge transfer in the Mediterranean world in post-antiquity. It assembles historians of... More
The Nature of Photographic Evidence Kelley Wilder
Even before the photographic invention was officially announced to the public in 1839, light sensitive materials were already being used to make scientific observations on the spectrum and on the chemical precipitation of metals. By the late... More
The Optical Life - Transformations of Optics in the Pre-modern Period Sven Dupré
This project studies the long-term development of optics between ca. 1400 and ca. 1700. Its central objects of study are the practices of optics and how these practices – if you wish, the ‘optical life’ - interacted with changing images of the... More
The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt during the Third Reich Dieter Hoffmann
The project aims to document the development of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (Imperial Institute for Physics and Technology / PTR) during the Third Reich. Since its foundation in 1887, the PTR was not just the... More
The Regulatory Archive: Science, Law, and Ethics in Biodiversity Conservation Etienne Benson
The rise of the sciences of biodiversity in the late twentieth century was closely tied to the collection, organization, and dissemination of biological and ecological data. Endangered species, for example, were the subject of... More
The Relationship Between Theory Formation and Disciplinary Organization in the Creation of French Psychology Sofie Lachapelle
The project is related to the development of psychology in France and the ways in which the theories, social organization, and physical structures came together to produce a new scientific discipline during the nineteenth and early twentieth... More
The Role of Vivisection in the 17th Century Domenico Bertoloni-Meli
Unlike other forms of investigation, such as microscopy, vivisection was not new in the 17th century. Nonetheless, it was developed in new ways and led to a number of strikingly original results. The study examines eight especially prominent cases... More
The Science of Statistics and the Politics of Census-Taking Christine von Oertzen
My project considers the transition from manual to machine data processing across Europe. The electronic tabulating machine appealed much more readily to some societies than others. Where concerns about migration were significant, frontiers... More
The Sciences of the Archive (2010-15) Lorraine Daston, Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, David Sepkoski, Fernando Vidal
"Data" (literally, “the givens”) is perhaps the most taken-for-granted word in all the sciences: short and unpretentious, it expresses the simplest and apparently most straightforward elements of empirical research. Whether... More
The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden, 1830-1920 Per Wisselgren
The aim of the project is to analyse the discursive formation of Swedish social science in the historical context of the ”social question”, i.e. the lengthy, broad-ranging and international discussions in which the social problems of Western... More
The Toad Kisser and the Bear’s Lair. The Case of Paul Kammerer’s Midwife Toad Revisited Klaus Taschwer
In summer 1926 one of the bigger scientific scandals in the first half of the last century broke. US zoologist G. Kinsley Noble claimed in an article published by the British journal “Nature” that the last remaining... More
The Transformation of Ancient Spatial Knowledge in its Intercultural Transfer: The Early Modern Translation of Euclid’s Elements into Chinese Jürgen Renn ; Matthias Schemmel
This research project analyzes the intercultural transmission of geometrical knowledge and its impact on culturally-specific notions of space. This transversal study of knowledge transformation, which is closely related to the project on the... More
The Writing of the Category of Hysteria (1670–1820) Sabine Arnaud
What were the processes that led medical writers to create the category of hysteria in the eighteenth century and thereby to define an area of competence specific to medical knowledge? How did they appropriate a... More
The popular science book: a new genre between literature and science in the late 19th and early 20th century Safia Azzouni
In Europe, popular science books emerged during the second half of the 19th century. They were not only written by scientists who wanted to make their work accessible to a broad public, but also by literary authors. Accordingly the question arises,... More
The split of rationality Olaf Engler; Jürgen Renn
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, reflection on science tended to be separated into four branches: a philosophical-normative branch, a historical-descriptive branch, a political-pragmatic branch, and a anthropological-ontological branch.... More
Theoretical Methods in Studies of the Nervous System, 1920-1960 Tara Abraham
The use of methods from the exact sciences in biology during the twentieth century, entailing issues of the disciplinary authority of physics, the reduction of biological phenomena to physical terms, and the autonomy of biology, has been a topic of... More
Theories of rationality in the history of science Olaf Engler; Jürgen Renn
Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, different theories of rationality emerged as a result of the reflection on science in the making. Investigations focus on the understanding of the genesis and development of these various theories of... More
Toward a Quantitative History of Data Daniel Rosenberg
The twenty-first century is a century of data. Our lives are tangled in webs of data, and tools for creating, storing, communicating, and manipulating this data have grown more sophisticated and ubiquitous.... More
Transformations of Cosmology Pietro D. Omodeo
This project investigates, from an epistemological and historical perspective, the forms of transmission, innovation and canonisation of astronomical and cosmological knowledge from the ancient world to the early modern era. Although there is no... More
Translating Everyday Experience Into Social Knowledge: Central European Feuilleton Culture Around 1900 Hansjakob Ziemer
This project is dedicated to exploring the links between the history of the feuilleton and knowledge production from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. In this period, often described as the “feuilletonistic age,” the feuilleton... More
Transmission of Alchemical and Artistic Practices and Materials in Mediaeval and Premodern Recipe Books Sylvie Neven
In the Middle Ages and Pre-Modern Period, artisanal knowledge was transmitted via collections of recipes often grouped concomitantly with alchemical texts and instructions. Except for some very well-known artistic treatises, such... More
Treasuries for Health: Medical Knowledge and Practice in the Early Modern English Household Elaine Leong
When Edward Conway, Viscount Conway and Kiluta retired to Petworth in 1650, he began a weekly correspondence with his nephew Sir Edward Harley. The letters cover a variety of topics from books to religion to contemporary politics to household... More
Turkey Red Wheat: The American Breadbasket and the Organization of Global Plant Genetic Resources Courtney Fullilove
Climate change and the late 20th-century globalization of the food supply have provoked renewed concern about the ability or inability of local, regional, and national communities to feed themselves. Human beings survive on a handful of cereal crops... More
Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation Veronika Lipphardt, Jenny Bangham, Samuël Coghe, Alexandra Widmer
The diversity of humankind is an abiding explosive political and moral issue. The research group “Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge about Human Variation” examines how life scientists, demographers and anthropologists imagined,... More
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‘Useful sciences’, technological innovation, and State bureaucracy in Prussia (ca. 1760-1830) Ursula Klein
Beginning in the 1760s, reformers in the Prussian State administration in Berlin organized the establishment of technical departments, such as a department of mining and smelting works, a department of civil architecture and... More
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Visualization in Geography: Scopic Regimes in Geography Between Photogrammetry and Digital Cartography, ca. 1930-1980 Boris Michel
Visuality and visual representation in the modern sciences and their role for the production of scientific knowledge are widely debated within the history of science and science studies. At the same time there is often very little work done from an... More
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War By Other Means: the Art and Science of Fireworks in Europe, 1500-1850 Simon Werrett;
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Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America Carla Bittel
In 1848, on the cover of the American Phrenological Journal, the firm of Fowlers and Wells instructed readers to turn the page and henceforth, “know thyself.” Using this ancient Greek aphorism, phrenologists drew in men and women alike with the... More
Women and the Spread of Biomedical Knowledge in Colonial Uganda Kathleen Vongsathorn
My project explores the role of women in the spread of biomedical knowledge in colonial Uganda, between 1897 and 1962.  While women rarely appear in the formal medical reports generated by Uganda’s colonial doctors, biomedically trained women... More
Women, Madness and Psychiatry in France. From Insane Females to Women Doctors (1800 to the present) Aude Fauvel
Studying the history of psychiatry from a gender point of view is now a classic genre in the English-speaking academic world. However, there is no such historiographical tradition in France, where only a very few studies have been written on the... More
Working Group: Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge Christine von Oertzen
This Working Group explored the intersections of gender and science. Its focus was contexts other than accredited institutions, state-sponsored universities, and research institutes. Employing gender as a category of analysis, this Working Group... More
Working Group: Cold War Rationality Lorraine Daston, Michael D. Gordin
A loose conglomerate of game theory, nuclear strategy, operations research, Bayesian decision theory, systems analysis, rational choice theory, and experimental social psychology, Cold War rationality in its heyday seemed the... More
Working Group: Endangerment and Its Consequences Fernando Vidal, Nelia Dias
The notion of endangerment stands at the heart of a network of concepts, values and practices dealing with objects threatened by disappearance, and with the devices, such as archives, catalogues or databases, aimed at preserving them. It thus opens... More
Working Group: Historicizing Big Data Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, David Sepkoski
Since the late 20th century, huge databases have become a ubiquitous feature of science, and Big Data has become a buzzword for describing an ostensibly new and distinctive mode of knowledge production.  Some observers have... More
Working Group: Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World Pamela Smith
Can we speak of a unified early modern world? Over the last decade at least, historians have debated whether overarching global connections can be detected in the period from about 1350 to about 1850. Among the various possibilities put... More
Working Group: Laboratories of Art Sven Dupré
This working group addresses the circulation of knowledge about materials between laboratories and artists’ workshops in the early modern period. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the term laboratorium was used to designate a... More
Working Group: Perspective as Practice Sven Dupré
This working group addresses the production and circulation of optical knowledge in workshop and design practices of the visual and decorative arts and (garden) architecture between the fourteenth and seventeenth century. Topics embraced include both... More
Working Group: Testing Drugs and Trying Cures in the Early Modern World Elaine Leong
This working group seeks to investigate the processes and practices through which early modern men and women tested and evaluated medicinal cures. The testing of remedies has long been mentioned as an important precursor to the... More
Working Group: The Archives of Deep-Time Sciences Lorraine Daston
History is built into the natural and human sciences at different levels: some disciplines, such as geology and archaeology, deal with phenomena that are intrinsically historical; others, such as sociology and mathematics, use their own... More
Working Group: The Learned Practices of Canonical Texts: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most
The creation of canons of written texts – religious, literary, philosophical, scientific – is a feature of numerous literate cultures from ancient times to the present. Such canons may crystallize cultural identities, confessional... More
Working with Full-Texts in the History of Science: Development of XML-Workflow and Content-based Web Access Jochen Büttner ; Robert Casties ; Klaus Thoden ; Jorge Urzúa ; Josef Willenborg ; Dirk Wintergrün
This project aims to support the implementation of some of the key Epistemic Web concepts. A group has been established on the basis of a cooperation with the MPDL in order to complement the generic infrastructure of the MPDL with an application... More
Writing and Reflection on Elementary Actions and Professional Practices: The Chinese Mohist Canon and Its Counterparts in Greek Science Matthias Schemmel
The research activity is devoted to the analysis of a unique source of ancient Chinese thinking, the so-called Mohist Canon, written around 300 B. C. In a series of working meetings continuing earlier work in the context of... More
Written Transmission: Books and Artists’ Recipes Sven Dupré; Sylvie Neven; Karin Leonhard; Barbara Tramelli; Mark Clarke;
This project studies the role of written transmission and circulation of knowledge in the early modern artist’s workshop and beyond. Knowledge of artist’s materials and their preparation and manipulation was transmitted in collections of recipes.... More
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X-Rays and Changing Perceptions of Disease and the Body in Germany circa 1900 Andrew Warwick
The project explores changing perceptions of disease and the body following the introduction of a new physics-based technology, x-rays, in Germany in 1896. My goal is to develop an analytical framework within which the widely varying uses of x-rays... More
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