Introducing New Staff and Format

3 comments
In a post on 1 February, AmericanScience in its current and evolving iteration was born.

The move from a single- to multi-author format was part of an effort to spark a wider conversation through internal dialogue on an expanded range of topics. So far, it seems to be working, and we hope readership and chatter will continue to grow.

The blog is now run by four early-career historians of science, as follows:


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Dan Bouk (Dan) is an assistant professor of history at Colgate University. He got into this business so that he could teach US cultural and intellectual history to excitable youths, and that's what he does. His manuscript-in-progress on the statistical endeavors of the American life insurance industry goes by the title, How Our Days Became Numbered:, with a post-colon bit that seems ever in flux. He serves double duty on this blog as a contributor and as the editor for the Forum for the History of Science in America. That means he gets to serve as the Forum's mouthpiece from time to time, but is otherwise his very own mouthpiece.

Henry Cowles (Hank) is a PhD candidate in History/History of Science at Princeton, where he's in the early stages of a dissertation on debates over "scientific method" amongst psychologists, philosophers, and other (mostly American) figures in the decades around 1900. Beyond this, he's likely to focus his posts on the engagement of science with the public and the emerging field of the "historiography of the present" (read: HOS gossip).

Joanna Radin (Joanna) is a PhD candidate in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania where she is completing a dissertation on the history of genetic studies of human biological variation after World War II. The way in which this project draws attention to the role of freezers in supporting blood as a scientific resource has led her to think a lot about "histories of the future" (which is not so much filled with gossip as sci-fi). Expect posts on history of biology and genetics, anthropology, ecology, and cryobiology.

Lukas Rieppel (Lukas) is a PhD student in the History of Science at Harvard. He's writing a dissertation about dinosaurs in science and popular culture during the late 19th and early 20th century. When he's not frantically trying to finish his dissertation, he's usually in the lab working on his master's project, which is about the population genetics of a Lycaenid butterfly in continental Europe. For some reason, he also likes to hang around with philosophers of science, so their (decidedly bad) influence might creep into a post every now and then.



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We hope you'll follow along as we explore this new means of community-building for historians of science in America, broadly-defined.

3 comments

I'm reading along, and enjoying the facelift so far! I'd love to see some conversation about the professional development aspects of our field, about our identity as historians of science, and about what that means for lives and careers. Ooh, and about teaching, too!

AZ! I agree. I was slotting some of those things in under the Historiography of the Present, so you'll definitely get some of that, at least from me.

Indeed Anna: that's a great agenda. We already have some good material on lives and careers coming down the pike--in fact, you wrote one bit in that queue (thanks!). And I have teaching posts, of sorts, in draft as we speak (type?).

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