Exploring Histories of Risk and Knowledge
Discusses history of risk as an emerging field and the ways it overlaps with the history of knowledge. Uses transnational perspectives on fire-fighting technologies as an example.
Research, Resources, Perspectives
Discusses history of risk as an emerging field and the ways it overlaps with the history of knowledge. Uses transnational perspectives on fire-fighting technologies as an example.
My book Underground Mathematics tells the story of a discipline that has been forgotten today, subterranean geometry. Known as “the art of setting limits” (Markscheidekunst) in German and geometria subterranea in Latin
Who do fossils belong to? The question is far from new: in various guises, it has preoccupied paleoscientists, museum curators, and occasionally officials for many years, although ongoing debates about the decolonization of science and natural history collections have renewed its significance.
Montaigne’s celebration of ignorance and simplicity in his erudite Essays (1580) may seem paradoxical at first, but such praises were not uncommon in the early modern period. Montaigne’s friend, Pierre Charron, made similar claims two decades later in his widely read treatise Of Wisdome.
In recent years, historians of knowledge have been exploring a wide range of knowledge forms that move beyond scientific/learned knowledge.
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
Since 1945, no German book on eugenics has been published. However, during two decades of reconstruction of the science of human genetics, which is fundamental to eugenics, the problems of eugenics repeatedly came to...
You may have heard of the antimalarial agent mefloquine during the Covid-19 pandemic, as scientists suggested repurposing the drug to combat the novel coronavirus. Most drugs are developed for the body of a 27-year-old...
In the summer of 1971, an eleven-year-old boy in Gothenburg, Sweden, wrote a letter to the pioneering environmentalist Hans Palmstierna. The boy had recently read a report on the environment in a youth magazine...