News

Call for Papers/Presentations: Fall 2016

June 03, 2016

The Early Science Working Group in the History of Science department is seeking graduate students to present work-in-progress in the 2016 Fall semester. The working group will meet twice or thrice a month, at 5 pm on Tuesday, in Science Center 469...

Kathryn Heintzman (Harvard, History of Science) - Curing in the Backyard: Recipes and the Animal Body in Cookery, Chymistry, and Medicine in the Ancien Régime

September 23, 2015

6 PM SC 469

Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University) - “What is a Werewolf? Genres, Practices, and Cataloguing Monsters from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution”

April 17, 2014

SC 469, 5pm – Co-sponsored by the Early Modern History Workshop and the Humanities Center Seminar in Book History This talk is about the history of European notions of what it meant to be human between the late Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution. I...

Paolo Savoia (Harvard, History of Science) – Saving Faces: Surgery and Masculinity in early Modern Italy

April 10, 2014

SC 469, 6pm Reconstructive surgery of mutilated parts of the face – of lips, ears, and especially noses – became an Italian specialty in the second half of the 16th century. The technique came from two families of Southern Italian barber-surgeons of the...

Nir Shafir - The Road From Damascus: Travel and Knowledge in the Seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire

March 27, 2014

SC469, 6pm In the mid- to late-seventeenth century a number of intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire began writing long travelogues in both Arabic and Turkish in an attempt to develop an epistemology of eye-witnessing through the practice of travel. These...

Cornel Zwierlein (History, University of Bochum), “Big City Fires, Fire Insurance and the Historical Narrative of Risk Sociology (17th to 19th c.)”

February 20, 2014

SC 469, 6pm Together with floods, big city fires were the greatest threat to everyday life and security in early modern cities right until the 19 th century. In a newly established database we count 8200 such fires for Central Europe between AD 1000 and...

Yan Liu (History of Science, Harvard), “Price of Immortality: Elixir Poisoning in Chinese Alchemy (4th-9th century)”

February 13, 2014

Science Center 469 – 6pm The tradition of alchemy in China is long. Unlike Western alchemy that focused on transmuting metals into gold, Chinese alchemy primarily aimed to make elixirs to achieve immortality. The materials used in Chinese tradition were...

Katharine Park and Ahmed Ragab

December 05, 2013

Knowledge on the Move: Scientific Encounters in the Muslim and Christian Worlds (8th to 16th century): work in progress SC469, 6pm This project, which is based on a course Ahmed Ragab and Katharine Park co-teach in the Department of the History of Science...

Noam Andrews - Training for the Abstract: Visualizing geometria in the 16th century German Lehrbuch

November 14, 2013

Science Center 469 @ 6pm. Register at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/eswg/noamandrews! While the typical geometry course in Renaissance Europe revolved around the teaching of Euclid’s Elements , the 16 th century German Lehrbücher were something...

Heavenly Imperfections: 400th anniversary of Galileo's discovery of the sunspots

October 04, 2013

Check out this wonderful event celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's discovery of the sunspots. Co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard, the Mahindra Humanities Center at...

Bina Arch, “Curious Creatures: Seeing, Classifying, and Imagining Whales in Early Modern Japan"

September 26, 2013

Thursday September 26th, Science Center 469, 6pm Bina Arch (Harvard, EALC), “Curious Creatures: Seeing, Classifying, and Imagining Whales in Early Modern Japan" In a scroll known as Rokugei no zu painted in 1847 and now held in the National Diet Library...

Harold J. Cook, "The Unexpected Descartes: Exile in the Netherlands?"

September 11, 2013

Early Sciences Working Group special event – co-sponsored by the Early Modern History Workshop – on Wednesday, September 11th, Thompson Room (Humanities Center). Professor Harold J. Cook (History, Brown University) will give a talk titled “The Unexpected...

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