Katharine Park

Visiting Scholar

Ph.D., Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

Funded by the Harvard University and the MPIWG

Residence: October 1, 2012–August 31, 2013

Profile

Katharine Park teaches in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and works on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of science and medicine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Her books include Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985); Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006); and Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998), co-authored with Lorraine Daston.  She and Daston have also co-edited volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2006), on science in early modern Europe.  In 1999, Wonders of Nature, which has also appeared in Italian and German translation, won the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society for the best book in the history of science.  Secrets of Women won the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women and Science Prize of the HSS in 2007 and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association of the History of Science in 2009.  Park continues to work on the history of gender, sexuality, and the female body in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as categories and practices of experience and observation in the Middle Ages.  Her most recent research is part of a collaboration with Ahmed Ragab of the Harvard Divinity School and focuses on the relationship between science and medicine in the medieval Islamicate and Latin Christian worlds.

Park received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of Science, an M.Phil. from the University of London (Warburg Institute) in Combined Historical Studies of the Renaissance, and a B.A. from Radcliffe College in History and Literature (Renaissance and Reformation).