First Year

William Deringer [email] ( B.A. Harvard University ) Willy's interests are in the history of science and social order, particularly in the ways methods of scientific investigation (e.g., quantification, experimentation, modeling) have been adopted in attempts to understand and regulate society, politics, and especially the economy. His particular research interests lie in the history of economic thought and other "social sciences" (including statistics and geography) in early modern England and the Atlantic World, as well as in the history of modern finance.

Victoria Leung [email] (B.A. Hons, Cambridge University; M.Sc., Imperial College London) Victoria’s research focuses on changes in biology and biological ideas in medicine through Japan’s nineteenth century. More broadly she is interested in the history of biology and the transfer of science to non-Western contexts. Her master's dissertation at London discussed the development of mutation breeding 1930-1980.

Margaret Schotte [email] ( B.A. Harvard University , M.A. University of Toronto) Margaret is interested in the intersection of history of technology and print culture in the early modern transatlantic world. Formerly a rare book cataloguer in New York , NY , she hopes to undertake a comparative study of 17th-century French navigation manuals.

Second Year

Howard Chiang [email] (B.A., B.S. Southern California; M.A. Columbia) Howard's research focuses on the history and material epistemology of the modern life sciences and biomedicine, with an emphasis on the global dynamics of gender and sexuality. His dissertation explores the changing meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern East Asia by historicizing the practical and conceptual dimensions of sex-alteration in 20th-century China . He is a member of the program committee for the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine, and he maintains his own web site at http://www.howardhchiang.com.

Yulia Frumer [email] (B.A., M.A. Tel Aviv University ) Yulia's research deals with scientific developments in eighteenth century Japan , focusing on the encounter between Japanese scholars and Western scientific artifacts. As part of this investigation she is also looking into European, particularly Dutch science of that period. On the methodological level she is interested in the way material culture plays a role in the formation and acquisition of novel concepts.

Ben Gross [email] ( B.A. Yale University ) Ben's current research focuses upon the development of American science museums during the twentieth century. He is also interested in the history of the physical sciences and the history of astronomy.

Robert MacGregor [email]  (B.A., B.S. Rice University ) Robert's research centers on Soviet cosmonautics in the first half of the twentieth century and the early Soviet and American space programs. Robert is also concerned with the rise of science fiction as a literary genre and its relation to early space pioneers and science in the Cold War.

Christopher McDonald [email] ( B.A. Rice University ; M.S. Purdue University ) Chris's research interests lie in 20th century science and technology, specifically computer technology. He intends to study the development of computers as mathematical, technological, and social artifacts. He is also interested in science and technology in the context of the Cold War.

Third Year

Catherine Abou-Nemeh [email] ( B.S. Northwestern University ) Catherine focuses on early modern Europe ( Italy , the Netherlands ). Her interests pertain largely to the history of astronomy, artisanal theory and practice, and the development of optics and lens-grinding techniques as well as to the history of medicine, and of anatomy in particular. Her very tentative dissertation title is "Hartsoeker's Homunculus: Optics, Politics, and Cartesian Mechanical Philosophy in the Dutch Republic ."

Melinda Baldwin [email] (B.S. Davidson College, MPhil Cambridge University) Lindy is writing her dissertation on the early history of the journal Nature, focusing on the journal's nineteenth-century rise to prominence, its treatment of scientific controversies such as spiritualism and radioactivity, and its impact on scientific internationalism in the twentieth century. Her broader interests include gender and science, the history of chemistry, and the history of the forensic sciences.

Carolyn Eisert [email] ( B.A. Wesleyan University , Psychology and Studio Art) Carrie is studying the history of human sciences and medicine in twentieth century American culture, and is also interested in medical anthropology and gender studies. Her dissertation will explore the ways medical experts conceptualized users of oral contraceptives in the 1960's, and how these ideas informed Pill marketing, packaging, and responses from patients.

Nam Ha [email] ( B.A. Rice University ) Nathan studies the history of the life sciences and biomedicine, with a focus on genetics. He is currently writing a dissertation on the history of genetics and theories of sex determination in the twentieth century. His broader interests include gender and science, the history of sexuality, and American cultural history.

Aviva Rothman [email] ( B.A. Columbia University ) Aviva is writing a dissertation on the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, in which she plans to consider Kepler as a member of multiple textual networks. She hopes to investigate more broadly questions of community and communication--scientific, philosophical, and theological--in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Europe.

Fourth Year

Dan Bouk  [email] ( B.S. Michigan State - mathematics) Dan is writing a dissertation on the "Science of Life Insurance." He explores the meaning of this phrase in the context of the work of mathematicians, statisticians, and other scientists in the American life insurance industry from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. He also writes about killing mosquitoes and researching wildlife, while maintaining broader interests in American intellectual history, the history of technology, and the history of the field sciences.

Fifth Year

Renee Raphael [email] ( B.A. Harvard University ) Renee is interested in many aspects of history of science, including the history of the physical sciences and science and colonialism. Her dissertation focuses on the reception of Galileo's mechanics, particularly his _Two New Sciences_, in the 17th-century European natural philosophical community.

Donna Sy [email] (B.A., B.S. Stanford University; M.A. Univ. California, Berkeley) Donna is interested in 17th-century European scientific and medical publishing, especially in the Elzevirs and their associates, the origins of the printed scientific/medical anthology, and associated processes of textual canonization in the early modern period.

ABD

Manfred Dietrich Laubichler [email] (M.S. University of Vienna, Austria - 1991, zoology; Ph.D. Yale Univerity - 1997, biology; M.A. Princeton University - 1998, history) works on topics in the history of biology and on conceptual and mathematical problems in evolutionary developmental biology. His thesis is devoted to the history of theoretical biology. He is currently an assistant professor of theoretical biology and the history of biology at Arizona State University .

Jakub Novak [email] Jakub Novák is interested in how evolutionary theory and biological, especially morphological, practice were integrated in nineteenth-century biology. His dissertation focuses on the role of an object of study, butterflies, in the work of three scientists, Alfred Wallace, August Weismann, and Theodor Eimer.

Gail Schmitt [email] (A.B. Biology, Vassar College ) Gail's central interests are in history of twentieth-century plant biology, genetics, and cell biology, and history of women in science. I am also interested in the history of twentieth-century Europe .

Rebecca Press Schwartz [email] (B.A. Case Western Reserve University, Physics and History of Science, 1998) Rebecca is working on an as-yet-untitled dissertation about the cultural history of the Manhattan Project. The window into this is the Smyth Report, the official history of the Manhattan Project. By examining the stories that it tells, and those that it doesn't, she tries to get at a broader range of experiences of working on the Manhattan Project than those in the standard histories of the Project. Among these unsung (or at least less-sung) individuals are the technical workers, engineers, and Army officers who worked with the better-known physicists.

Alistair Sponsel [email] (B.A. (History), B.S. (Biology) Indiana ; MSc Imperial College , ( London ). Alistair is interested in the history of scientific expeditions and experiments, and the variety of practices and theoretical approaches found in modern scientific disciplines. He is exploring these issues in a dissertation on theories of coral reef formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jeris Stueland Yruma [email] (B.A., B.S. Michigan State) Jeris is completing a dissertation on the discovery of nuclear fission, focusing on the different ways in which narratives of that discovery were formulated and what these tell us about the changing natures of scientific disciplines and personalities during the mid-twentieth century. She is broadly interested in the history of science in the United States and Western Europe , gender and science, and science and the state.

Doogab Yi [email] (B.S., M.A. Seoul University ) Doogab's research focuses on the history of biomedical research in the twentieth century. His dissertation looks at the development of recombinant DNA technologies in the context of ongoing research in biochemistry, molecular biology, and microbiology in the 1960s and 1970s. His other research interests include the history of biotechnology and the commercialization of biology in the last half of the twentieth century.

Dissertations in Progress