Faculty and Staff of the Program in History of Science
Faculty
- D.
Graham Burnett
(Ph.D. Cambridge, 1997[2001]) has focused his research on the role of
the geographical sciences in European colonialism, but he has also worked
on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and 17th century optics. His
first book, Masters of All They Surveyed, was published by the University
of Chicago Press in the autumn of 2000. He serves as an editor of Volume IV
of The History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press, 1987 forward),
and was a 1999-2000 fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New
York Public Library. He has taught at Yale and Columbia Universities.
-
Angela
N.H. Creager (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1991) specializes
in the history of the modern life sciences. She is author of several
articles on the history of biochemistry and molecular biology and one book,
The
Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965
(Chicago,
2002). She is currently studying the effects of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission's radioisotope distribution program on biological and medical
research after World War II. Her other interests include the relationship
of feminism to modern science and historical interactions between the physical
and biological sciences.
-
Benjamin A. Elman (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania,
1980) is Professor of East Asian Studies and History with his primary department
in East Asian Studies. His teaching and research fields include: 1) Chinese
intellectual and cultural history, 1000-1900; 2) history of science in
China, 1600-1930; 3) history of education in late imperial China; 4) Sino-Japanese
cultural history, 1600-1850. His publications include: From Philosophy
To Philology (1984, 1990, 2001); Classicism, Politics, and Kinship
(1990);
A
Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000).
He is currently completing two projects: A Cultural History of Modern Science
in Late Imperial China; and From 'Chinese Science' to 'Modern Science in
China'.
-
Daniel E. Garber (Ph.D. Harvard, 1975) has
recently joined the faculty at Princeton with a primary appointment in
the Philosophy Department, after many years at the University of Chicago.
His principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science,
and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. Garber is the author
of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992) and Descartes Embodied
(2001),
and is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
(1998). He is currently working on a variety of topics, including studies
of Aristotelianism and its opponents in early seventeenth-century France
and physics and philosophy in Leibniz's thought. His gravlax is considered
by many to be a wonder of nature.
-
Charles
C. Gillispie (Emeritus) (Ph.D. Harvard, 1949) founded undergraduate
teaching in history of science at Princeton in 1956 and the Graduate Program
in 1960. Now retired, he participates in the Program Seminar, in colloquia,
and in consulting with students. He specializes in 18th and early 19th-century
science, and particularly in the relation of science to political and intellectual
developments in France during the Enlightenment and the revolutionary and
Napoleonic era. His most widely read book is The Edge of Objectivity
(1960; new edition 1992). His publications include Pierre-Simon Laplace,
1749-1847: A Life in Exact Science (1997). He is currently working
on Science and Polity in France, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years
(Princeton University Press, 2004).
-
Michael Gordin (Ph.D. Harvard, 2001) specializes
in the history of the physical sciences, with a particular interest on
science in Russia and the Soviet Union. He has published a series of articles
on topics such as science and bureaucracy, imperial Russian reform, science
and literature, and the history of biological warfare. He is the editor
(with Peter Galison and David Kaiser) of the four-volume Routledge History
of Modern Physical Science, and is currently working on a book on Russian
chemist D. I. Mendeleev and the culture of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.
-
Anthony T. Grafton (Ph.D. Chicago, 1975) is
currently completing three projects: a study of learned magic in Renaissance
Europe, which concentrates on the German world around 1500; a collaborative
study of the libraries of Caesarea in the third and fourth centuries AD,
with Megan Williams (Michigan); and a collaborative study of the sixteenth-century
English polymath Gabriel Harvey as a reader (with Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary
London; Bill Sherman, Maryland; and Nick Popper, Princeton). Once these
are done, he plans to write a history of Renaissance Europe and a large-scale
history of the study of time in seventeenth-century Europe.
-
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Ph.D. Harvard, 1984) specializes
in the history of the human sciences, with particular interest in psychiatry
and psychoanalysis. She teaches twentieth-century U.S. history, gender
history, and the history of the human sciences. She is the author of The
Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America
(1994) and, with Bennett Simon, Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case
Notes from an American Psychoanalysis, 1912 (2003), and the editor
of several other books. She is currently writing a book on The Americanization
of Narcissism.
-
Michael
S. Mahoney (Ph.D. Princeton, 1967) has taught history and history
of science at Princeton since 1965. He divides his teaching and research
between the history of the mathematical science from Antiquity to 1700
and the history of technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author
of The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat (Princeton, 1973;
2nd ed. 1994), of René Descartes, The World (Le Monde) (Abaris,
1979), and of studies of Huygens, Barrow, and Newton, he has written more
generally on the development of algebra and analysis during the 17th century,
as well as on ancient and medieval mathematics. He is currently engaged
in a study of the origins of theoretical computer science during the 1950s
and '60s and in the development of software engineering.
-
Gyan Prakash (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania,
1984) specializes in the history of colonial India, and his research and
teaching interests include the relationship between colonialism and production
of knowledge. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor
Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and his publications include the
edited volume, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial
Displacements (1995). His most recent book, Another Reason: Science
and the Imagination of Modern India (1999), explores the historical
composition and functioning of science's cultural authority in colonial
and postcolonial India. He is currently engaged in a research on the history
of Bombay as an idea.
-
Helen Tilley (D.Phil., University of Oxford,
2001) specializes in the history of science in colonial Africa, placing
particular emphasis on environmental, medical, and anthropological sciences.
Her research examines the mutual influences of imperialism and disciplinary
development. She is also interested in exploring intersections between
environmental history and the history of science, especially in tropical
environments, as well as the history of racial science and medicine. She
has written several articles and book chapters on the history of ecology,
eugenics, agriculture, and epidemiology in tropical Africa and is co-editor
of a volume titled Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Ordering
of Africa.
Staff