Contributors
Eleftheria Akrivopoulou studied Archaeology & Museology at University of Athens. She is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of History, Archaeology & Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly. She works as an museologist at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. She has dealt with excavation work and museological research at many museums as well as at the Greek Ministry of Culture. Her research has been published in conference proceedings and periodicals.
Stewart Allen completed his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 2014. He pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science between 2014 and 2016 and has previously written on knowledge production, skill, and how narratives of social good are produced and circulated. He is the author of the book An Ethnography of NGO Practice in India: Utopias of Development published by Manchester University Press.
Pit Arens graduated from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His interdisciplinary work moves between science and art, craft and sculpture, theory and practice, text and image. He works in different media: sculpture, installation, film, drawing and ceramics.
Susanne Bauer is professor in Science and Technologies Studies (STS) at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. Trained as environmental scientist and epidemiologist, her work in the social studies of science has unpacked calculative infrastructures and data politics in the health sciences. Her current research interests range from the conditions of intensified data recombination and the making and circulation of regulatory knowledges, to airports as multiple borderlands, and logistics as technoscience.
Etienne Benson is an associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies animal history, the history of ecology, and the history of environmentalism, with a focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. He is the author of Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (2010).
Sarah Blacker is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society at the Technical University of Munich. Her research examines the production and circulation of scientific knowledge about the relation between environmental contamination, racialization, and health inequalities in the era of financialization.
Stephanie Bowry is a historian specialising in the cultural performance of museums during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She completed her PhD on the visual representation of the world in early modern curiosity cabinets and its reflection in contemporary art practice in 2015. Her most recent research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted by the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, examined the relationships between gardens and art galleries from 1500 – 1750.
Emily Brownell is a lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Edinburgh. Her book, Gone to Ground: An Environmental History of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work focuses on environmental, infrastructural, and planning histories in East Africa.
Shih-Pei Chen is a digital humanities researcher at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she researches and develops digital methodologies for studying the history of science, technology, and medicine. She specializes in conducting text analyses, text/data mining, data visualization, and geospatial analyses to answer historical research questions. Her current project develops tools to explore thousands of Chinese local gazetteers in unprecedented ways.
Yi-Ping Cheng obtained her PhD from the department of Sociology, Lancaster University in the UK in 2013. Her PhD thesis discussed the domestic consumption in Taiwan, and her research foci mainly relate to home consumption, material culture and sociology. Starting from 2014, she works as an assistant professor in the department of Public Affairs and Civic Education, in National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan.
Beatrix Darmstädter graduated from Saxophone Classic, Musicology (PhD 1998), Philosophy, and ‘Education and Cultural Communication Management’ with honors. Since 2001, she works as the curator of the collection of historic musical instruments (SAM) of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (KHM). Her main organological research topic is the application of 3D-CT (non-contact) measurement of historical woodwind instruments. In addition, she focuses on biographical research on Austrian instrument makers, and on performing practice.
Deanna Day is a writer and historian. Her writing about science and culture, humans and cyborgs, and women and data has appeared in Lady Science, Model View Culture, Cabinet, Slate, and elsewhere around the internet. She lives in Los Angeles. http://deannaday.net
Don Duprez received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. His current research explores reproduction, religious hybridization and efficacy among Hmong communities in the United States. Duprez has also conducted research among Japanese transnationals, Chinese Americans, and Chinese Han and ethnic minority populations. His research interests include health and religion, ethics, epistemological and ontological issues, time and memory, feminism, gender, transnational and communities in diaspora. He is currently based in Denver, Colorado.
Hanako Endo is a lecturer at Japanese Red Cross College of Nursing. Her research interest is mainly in Shakespeare from the perspective of the history of medicine. Her articles include ‘Illyria as the Carnivalesque State: Twelfth Night and the Consumption of Alcohol’ (2016) and ‘Bloodletting and the Control of Passion in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’ (2018). She is now working on a book on Shakespeare and Medicine.
Eric J. Engstrom is a historian of psychiatry and research associate in the Department of History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He received his BA from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, his MA from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and his PhD from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He has published widely in the history of psychiatry. He is currently researching the history of forensic politics in Berlin, 1887–1914.
Mats Fridlund is a historian of science and technology at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the University of Gothenburg and has previously held positions at universities in Finland, Denmark, England and the USA. He studies the cultural and political history of technology and materiality where his current research program interrogates the role of science and technology in the emergence and globalization of terrorisms since the 19th century.
Styliana Galiniki is an archaeologist at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki and holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (School of Architecture). Her research focuses on the use of antiquity in the construction of social identity and the public performances of collective memory. She is also a published novelist.
Johanna Gonçalves Martín is an anthropologist, medical doctor and epidemiologist, who has worked for several years with the Yanomami in Venezuela, and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Area and Global Studies (EPFL). She is interested in the anthropology of health and wellbeing among Amazonian peoples, including life protecting practices, bodies and territories, gender and fertility, and the relationships between indigenous peoples and a diversity of outsiders, including doctors.
Mathias Grote is a historian, philosopher and ex-practitioner of the life sciences. He is interested especially in recent developments of microbiology as well as in molecular biologies beyond genetics (Membranes to Molecular Machines. Active Matter and the Remaking of Life, Chicago 2019). In another project, he pursues the question of how the 20th century sciences have managed to canonize knowledge through media such as the handbook (https://historyofknowledge.net/lbtb/). He is assistant professor at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Nils Güttler is a historian of science and technology. He received his doctorate in the history of science from Humboldt University, Berlin. His dissertation appeared as Das Kosmoskop. Karten und ihre Benutzer in der Pflanzengeographie des 19. Jahrhunderts (2014). Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow at the chair for science studies at the ETH, Zurich. His ongoing research focuses on the environmental history of the Frankfurt-am-Main airport.
Tanja Hammel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the History Department at the University of Basel and teaches at the History Department at the University of Zurich. She is a member of the interdisciplinary research project “African Contributions to Global Health: Circulation Knowledge and Innovations” wwww.globalhealthafrica.ch. Her areas of interest are in the history of science and knowledge, new colonial history, visual history, South African history, biographical studies as well as museum and critical heritage studies.
Jameson Kısmet Bell is an assistant professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include literature and medicine, the body and knowledge, as well as performance and media studies. His recent book, Performing the Sixteenth-Century Brain: Beyond Word and Image Inscriptions (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2018), bridges literary criticism and history to offer close readings of the first visually accurate representations of the body and brain.
Victoria Lee is assistant professor in the Department of History at Ohio University, where she teaches and writes about modern science and technology. She is currently writing a book about Japanese society’s engagement with microbes in science, industry, and environmental management. She has published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (ed. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland), and Osiris.
Bonnie Mak is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, jointly appointed in the School of Information Sciences, History, and the Program in Medieval Studies. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines the interface of the page as it is developed across time, geographies, and technologies.
Ulrich Mechler is a researcher at the Museum of Medical and Pharmaceutical History of Kiel University. His research interests include collection and object-based studies in the history of science and medicine. In his dissertation he investigated transformations of disease research in postwar medicine using the case collection of the German pathologist Karl Lennert. Currently he works as Postdoc Fellow on a collection of female pelvic bones about clinical birth medicine in the 19th century.
Tahani Nadim is a sociologist of science and Junior Professor in the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in a joint appointment with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. She is a member of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH). Her research focuses on the datafication of natures and its consequences. She heads the department ‘Humanities of nature’ at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
Christine von Oertzen is a senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She explores the material culture of data processing since the nineteenth century. She is co-editor of the 2017 Osiris volume on Data Histories (with Elena Aronova and David Sepkoski) and of Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (with Carla Bittel and Elaine Leong), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019.
Jan Eric Olsén is an independent scholar living in Malmö, Sweden. He has written widely on the history of medicine and is currently completing a book on the material heritage of blindness and the complex relation between vision and touch in Western culture.
Mirka Palioura studied French Letters and Art History (BA, PhD Athens University, MA Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne). She has edited two books and presented several conference papers on nineteenth-century Greek art. She has taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Hellenic Open University. She has also worked in the Greek Ministry of Culture. She is a Member of the Hellenic Association of Art Historians and is currently working in the Finopoulos Collection – Benaki Museum.
Julia Pollack is creative program manager at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. She previously worked as a librarian at Bronx Community College in New York, and a user experience (UX) designer at a technical consulting agency in Urbana.
Spyridoula Pyrpyli (BA in Greek philology and MA in museology) holds a PhD in museology and has been working in Greek museums and galleries. She is now teaching ancient Greek, modern Greek literature and history in Greek high schools, art history and museology in Ioannina University (Greece). Her research interests focus on the social role the museum, the digital museum, the relation between museums and public history.
Lucy Razzall is a teaching fellow in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University College London. Her research focuses on the relationships between early modern literature and materiality. She has published on, amongst other things, emblem books, relics, and early modern print, and she is currently finishing her first book, Boxes and Books in Early Modern England.
Maria Rentetzi is professor at the Technical University Berlin. She has published widely on the history of nuclear sciences with an emphasis on gender, material culture, and science diplomacy. A physicist by training, Rentetzi currently leads an ERC Consolidator Grant that studies the history of radiation protection and the role the International Atomic Energy Agency has played as a diplomatic and political international institution in shaping radiation policies and nuclear diplomacies.
Dagmar Schäfer is a historian of science, technology and China, currently directing Dept. III Artefacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She has published widely on the Premodern history of China; technology, materiality, and the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems; and the changing role of artefacts—texts, objects, and spaces—in the creation, diffusion, and use of scientific and technological knowledge.
Martina Schlünder is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. As a scholar in feminist science studies she explores and analyses the politics of technoscience in reproductive technologies, their broader implications in the history of eugenics, biopolitics and feminisms.
Martina Siebert works as area specialist for China at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and as independent scholar. She researches and publishes on Chinese exploration into nature and technology through history with a focus on the styles and agendas of presenting and organizing that knowledge in writing, including how scholars approached the realm of the inexplicable.
Myrto Vouleli is a conservator (paper, photography) at the Historical Archives of National Bank of Greece. She holds degrees from the Institute for Conservation of Arts, Athens and London-Camberwell college of arts. Her work experiences range from the Byzantine Museum of Athens, Benaki Museum in Athens to Guildhall Library in London and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
Alexandra Widmer is assistant professor in the Anthropology Department at York University. Her research program examines the social and political lives of biomedicine and science in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She has published on demography’s implications in state attempts at the management of populations, the medical education of Pacific Island men and women to work in colonial contexts and Pacific Island women’s reproductive health, especially indigenous women’s caregiving practices at birth.
Artemis Yagou is a historian of design and technology. She is research associate at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum (Munich), currently working on ‘How they Played: Children and Construction Toys (ca. 1840–1940)’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Additionally, she is preparing a monograph on luxury in early modern southeastern Europe. She has published extensively, including Fragile Innovation: Episodes in Greek Design History (2011).