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
-
Daniel E. Garber
-
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). He is currently working on the sequel to Science
and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (1980). It treats
the period from 1789 through the 1820s.
-
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.
He is currently a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Society of Fellows.
-
Anthony T. Grafton (Ph.D. Chicago, 1975) has
been associated with the history of science at Princeton since 1975. His
interests include the history of science both in Antiquity and in the Renaissance,
as well as the relations between the study of the classical world and the
practice of science in early modern Europe. He has written Joseph Scaliger,
I (Oxford, 1983) and II (Oxford, 1993); (with Lisa Jardine) From Humanism
to the Humanities (Harvard, 1986); Forgers and Critics (Princeton,
1990); and Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age
of Science (Harvard, 1991); and The Tragic Origins of the German
Footnote (Harvard and Faver, forthcoming). He is currently working
on the astrology of Girolamo Cardano and (with Noel Swerdlow) on a study
of Johannes Regiomontanus.
-
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Ph.D. Harvard, 1984) specializes
in the history of psychiatry, with particular interest in gender issues.
She teaches twentieth-century U.S. history, women's history, and the history
of the human sciences. The author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge,
Gender, and Power in Modern America (1994), she is currently working
on the early practice of psychoanalysis in the United States and has begun
a book-length project on the American personality in society and culture
from 1940 to the present.
-
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 current interest
centers on the relationship between colonialism and science. He is the
author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial
India (1990), and his publications include a recently-edited volume,
After
Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995).
He is presently completing a book manuscript which describes the composition
and functioning of the cultural authority of science in the imagination
of modern India.
-
Helen Tilley
Staff