Japan was home to a rich tradition of natural history well before the introduction of European natural history after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In his book The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago UP, 2015), Federico Marcon documents this tradition and shows the surprising similarities between Japanese natural history from 1600 to 1900 and European natural history over the same period. Marcon's book was the subject of the Global History and Culture Centre Reading Group on 27 Feb, 2019. The book prompted discussion of the relationship between environmental history and the history of science, the value of comparing regional traditions of natural history, and the role of commodities in the history of ideas.

More details here.

What did rococo art have to do with the science of light and electricity? A great deal, as we see if we focus on the substances that scientists and artists had in common, such as steel, porcelain, lacquer, gold leaf, and precious stones. This talk by Michael Bycroft was part of the seminar series of the Warwick History of Art Department.

We're delighted to announce the introduction of a new survey course in the history of science and technology at the Department of History, University of Warwick.

Science, Technology and Society, 1400 to Present (HI2D5) will be offered to second-year undergraduates, providing an introduction to the history of science and technology from the Renaissance to today. The course is taught by a team with expertise ranging from early modern natural philosophy to twentieth-century Soviet technology.

The seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher left behind a rich correspondence with far-flung members of the Jesuit missionary order to which he belonged. This talk mapped out the correspondence and explored its significance for Kircher's kaleidoscopic investigations into history, language, geography and the natural world. Prof. Susanna Burghartz (Basel) commented.

This was the 2019 annual lecture of the Global History and Culture Centre.

Thursday 17th May, 5-6:30pm, R0.3/4 Ramphal building, University of Warwick.

Professor Lawrence Principe is a distinguished historian of science whose research has transformed our view of early modern alchemy. He has shown that early alchemical texts, despite their obscure and symbolic language, were based on real chemical operations. He made a week-long visit to Warwick on May 7-11, 2018, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study as an International Visiting Fellow. Principe's activities included a public lecture, a masterclass on historical alchemy (with live experiments!), and a range of other workshops and meetings. The visit was supported by the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance.

Details of the visit

A blog post summarising the visit

Doing historic experiments for research purposes is one thing; building them into the university curriculum is another. This workshop brought together ten Warwick staff and students to explore how this can be done. Examples included a Grecian vase, Carthaginian coins, an ancient cure for the common cold, a medieval cure for eye infection, an exploding glass drop, and a working printing press from early in the twentieth century.

Supported by the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, as part of Lawrence Principe's IAS-hosted visit to Warwick.

Tuesday 8th May 2018, 12:30-2pm; seminar room of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance

This talk traced the reception history of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, the first major printed illustrated atlas of anatomy. Based on the Vesalius Census, it examined how copies of the two first editions have circulated around the globe since their publication, and how readers and owners have annotated the book.

A seminar hosted by the Centre for the History of Medicine and the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre.

Mars, we are told, will soon be inhabited. Space entrepreneurs and so-called tech-visionaries have declared it so. These manifestos for an off-earth future explicitly eschew the politics of climate change in favour of a ‘pure’ technological solution to planetary demise. In this talk Joshua Nall argues that this form of capitalist delusion has a longer history than we might expect: planetary decay and the allure of Mars have been implicated in the fantasies of industrialists for at least 120 years.

Nall is Curator of Modern Sciences, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge.

This talk was part of the seminar series of the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, and took place on 23 Jan, 2018, 12-2pm, in the IAS seminar room.

Lorraine Daston is a historian of science based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she has directed a research group since 1995. In a wide-ranging interview at the University of Warwick, she spoke about the evolution of the discipline of the history of science, the research programme known as historical epistemology, the nuts and bolts of collaboration in the humanities, and the transience of scientific theories.

Text freely available from Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (2017).

Sven Dupré visited the University of Warwick as an International Visiting Fellow sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study. The visit took place from March 6 to March 10, 2017, and included a masterclass for students and a public lecture. The visit was hosted by the Global History and Culture Centre.

Details of the visit.