Sarah Lowengard

Sarah Lowengard is a New York City-based historian of technology and science whose research interests consider the materials sciences of material culture in the early modern West. While at the MPIWG, she will work on the complex of transitions and transformations in chemistry, biology, and dyehouse practices connected to the eighteenth-century history of the cotton color Turkey Red. Other ongoing research projects include a study of the technologies of printing in colors before the invention of lithography, and a series of essays about the social, technological, and scientific transformations that resulted from eighteenth-century encounters between East and West.

A practicing art conservator for more than 40 years, Lowengard received a PhD in History from SUNY-Stony Brook, and has held fellowships from or at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, the Smithsonian, and the National Science Foundation. Her dissertation was published as The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2006) through an innovative born-digital publishing initiative. She is a member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union in New York City, and participates in the Printing Colour Project (London). Lowengard was an advisory editor for Technology and Culture from 2001 to 2017 and served on the Society for the History of Technology’s Dibner Award Committee 1997–2000.