Pamela Smith

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the "Making and Knowing Project."  Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. She led the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of "Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France" (2020) and its Open Access research and teaching resources, the "Research and Teaching Companion" for instructors and students wishing to integrate hands-on lessons into teaching and learning, and an open source and customizable publishing tool, EditionCrafter, which allows users to publish digital editions as feature-rich and sustainable static sites. She is now working on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.