Workshop Events

  • Walt Schalick
  • Assistant Professor of Medical History, Rehabilitation Medicine, History of Science and Pediatrics

  • The Three R's in Action: Textual Medicine and Market Control in the Middle Ages

  • December 10, 2009 @ 4:30 pm
  • 4207 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.


  • Daniel Selcer (Duquesne) and Theresa Smith (Harvard)

  • Facsimile, Indiscernibility, and Images of the Copernican World

  • November 12, 2009 @ 3:00 pm
  • 4207 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.
  • A manuscript facsimile necessarily differs from the original it reproduces.  It is nevertheless a literary object in its own right, with the peculiar property of rendering accessible to scholarly scrutiny the often inaccessible ground for the production of a print edition.  What are we to make of a case where multiple facsimiles of the same manuscript differ among themselves?  Between 1944 and 1974 no less than nine facsimiles of the autograph of Copernicus' De revolutionibus were published, a profusion related to the manuscript's current inaccessibility to researchers.  In the early 1970s, Charles Eames took a series of stunning photographs of the manuscript.  The facsimiles and Eames' photos, however, reveal an apparent contradiction: there both is and is not a hole in the manuscript page at the center of Copernicus' emblematic diagram of the heliocentric universe. The stakes of the seemingly trivial empirical question of whether such a hole exists, we argue, involve an interrogation of the material nature of textual production, the staged physicality of scientific inquiry, and the limits of the constitution of literary objects.

  • Daniel Selcer is an associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, where he teaches the history of early modern thought. He has published in Representations, Continental Philosophy Review, and other journals. His Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription will appear this winter from Continuum Books. Theresa Smith is a paper conservator for Special Collections in the Harvard University Library and has worked at the Fogg Art Museum and the Kupferstichkabinett-Berlin. She is a member of the editorial board of Restaurator and has published in Technè: La science au service de l'histoire de l'art et des civilisations and the American Institute for Conservation's Book and Paper Group Annual.

  • Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
  • Uppsala University

  • Performative Properties: Wild Animals, Intellectual Property, and the Museum

  • October 29, 2009 @ 3:00 pm
  • 4207 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.

  • Please join us to hear Eva Hemmungs Wirtén talk about the Victorian
    fascination with classification and scientific control and its
    relationship to the display of wild animals in the natural history
    museum. By considering wild animals as boundary objects of private and
    public ownership and control, Professor Wirtén connects the element of
    performativity in the new public space of the museum with an emerging
    culture of intellectual property, which increasingly depends on staging
    its properties, sometimes through lies, trickery, and fraud. Based on
    her work in/ Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual
    Commons/ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), Professor Wirtén
    will connect the past with the present by discussing what impact the
    digitization of museum collections has on the intersection of private
    and public.

    Professor Wirtén will also be giving a History of Science brown bag at noon on October 30 (204 Bradley Memorial Building) on "Branding Science: The Intellectual Properties of Marie Curie."

  • Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Library and Information Science in the department of Archival Science, Library and Information Science, Museology, and Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of/ No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization/ (2004) and/ Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons/ (2008), both University of Toronto Press. During 2009-10 she leads the Swedish part of the EU7th Framework project COUNTER (www.counter2010.org), which considers questions of filesharing, user-generated content, and copyright and also works on a project on translation and copyright. For more on Professor Wirtén's work, see (www.abm.uu.se/evahw).

    Tom Broman
  • Tom Broman
  • Associate Professor, History of Science and Medical History & Bioethics; Chair, History of Science

  • Criticism and the Circulation of News: The Scholarly Press in the Late Seventeenth Century

  • September 24, 2009 @ 3:00 pm
  • 4246 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.
  • Please join the Mellon/White Workshop on Science and Print Culture for a discussion of Professor Tom Broman's paper, "Criticism and the Circulation of News: The Scholarly Press in the Late Seventeenth Century." 
     
    For a copy of Professor Broman's paper, please contact Florence Hsia <fchsia@wisc.edu> or 262-3971.

  • Professor Broman is Professor of History of Science and Medical History and Bioethics at UW-Madison and Chair of the History of Science Department. He is interested in the history of early modern science and medicine and has devoted much of his recent research to the origins and early history of the periodical press. His publications include Science and Civil Society, co-edited with Lynn K. Nyhart (Chicago, 2002); "On the Epistemology of Criticism. Science, Criticism and the German Public Sphere, 1760-1800," in Jörg Schönert (ed), Literaturwissenschaft und Wissenschaftsforschung (Tübingen, 2000), 6-26; "The Habermasian Public Sphere and Science in the Enlightenment," History of Science 36 (1998): 123-49; and The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750-1820 (Cambridge, 1996).

  • Neil Safier
  • Assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia

  • The Material Map: A Journey through the Worlds of the Carta de la Provincia de Quito (1750)

  • April 6, 2009 @ 4:00 pm
  • 4207 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.

  • Please join us for a discussion with Neil Safier of an eighteenth-century map of the Spanish American province of Quito, from its observational origins in the Andes and the compilatory practices of the Spanish American Creole Pedro Vicente Maldonado, to its cartographic transformations in the Parisian atelier of Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, and its later fortunes in France, Spain, England, and ultimately, Quito itself.

  • Neil Safier is assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He has published several articles on the cartographic, botanic, narrative, and other dimensions of the cultural encounter between Enlightenment Europe and colonial Brazil and Amazonia, and is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)

    • Download the Reading(s)
    Measuring - chap 4

  • Teaching Forum on Science and Print Culture

  • March 2, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
  • 6191 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.

  • Please join us for a roundtable discussion of pedagogical techniques and classroom experiences in teaching on the intersection of science andprint culture from the early to the middle modern era. Participants include Susan Bernstein, Tom Broman, Florence Hsia, Lynn Nyhart, Robin Rider, and Peter Susalla. Need help finding it? Read about the location and directions.

  • Bernard Lightman

  • Print Culture and the Popularization of Evolution

  • February 17, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
  • 6191 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Mellon - Print Culture events.
  • Please join us and Professor Bernard Lightman for a brownbag discussion of his paper, "Print Culture and the Popularization of Evolution," available for download below. Print Culture and the Popularization of Evolution
    Illustrations

  • Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University and editor of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society. He has published extensively on a wide range of topics concerning science in Victorian Britain, including scientific imagery, gender and science, scientific periodicals, and the relationship between science and religion. His most recent monograph is Victorian popularizers of science: Designing nature for new audiences (University of Chicago Press, 2007). He has also co-edited Figuring it out: Science, gender, and visual culture (Dartmouth College Press, 2006) with Ann Shteir, and Science in the marketplace: Nineteenth-century sites and experiences (University of Chicago Press, 2007) with Aileen Fyfe. Currently he is working on a biography of John Tyndall, and, with the support of the Mellon Foundation and the help of an international team of scholars, he is engaged in obtaining, digitalizing, transcribing, and publishing the collected correspondence of this important Victorian physicist.