Graduate Students @ History of Science
Michitake Aso: Broadly speaking, I am interested in the history of the environment, science, and medicine in Southeast Asia. I look forward to dealing with questions that arise at the intersections of these fields in a dissertation tentatively titled “Colonial Ecologies: Environment, Health, and Politics in French Indochina, 1890-1940.” I plan to focus my research on the rubber plantations of Southern Indochina and look at how the environmental and health changes brought about by these endeavors transformed both the land and the people living on it. I also hope to investigate the post-colonial memories of rubber.
Kellen Backer: Kellen Backer works primarily on 20th century U.S. history and is pursuing a joint Ph.D. in History and History of Science. His dissertation examines how World War II shaped the history of food in the U.S. More generally, he is interested in applying methods gleaned from social and cultural histories of science, technology, and medicine to understanding the history of food.
Meridith Beck Sayre: Meridith completed her MA paper, “Gardeners of God: The Jesuit project of cultivating soils and souls in New France, 1632-1674,” in the spring of 2008. After focusing on early-modern Jesuit understandings of nature, she has become increasingly interested in the Native American perspective. She is investigating how the concept of a Native American race was constructed in early Anthropological writings and visual culture. In addition to exploring the Anthropologist’s Indian, she is considering how Native Americans have changed and shaped Anthropology, especially in terms of film and photography.
Jocelyn Bosley (e-mail): In her research, Jocelyn integrates historical and philosophical approaches to explore a broad range of topics at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and science. Her dissertation considers how the epistemic category of (binary) "sex" was constituted in and through the category of "life" in the decades around 1800, when scholars working in a variety of intellectual traditions endeavored to construct biology as a discrete and autonomous discipline. This work expands upon Jocelyn's interest in the interplay between gender/sex and other forms of boundary-making--her master's paper, "'From Monkey Facts to Human Ideologies': Theorizing Female Orgasm in Human and Nonhuman Primates, 1967-1983," explored how ideas about sex and gender operate on the human/animal boundary. A revised version of that paper will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Jocelyn also mentors highly gifted elementary and middle-school students, who will testify with a mixture of amusement and resignation that she enjoys concocting harebrained schemes to teach them about, and interest them in, the history of science.
Bridget Collins: Bridget studies the history of American public health, the relationships between environment and health, and the history of women's role in health care (both as providers and as patients). She completed her Master's paper, “Every Home Safe: Tuberculosis in Madison, WI 1908-1950,” in 2006 and is now working on her dissertation, "The Transformation of Domestic Medicine in America, 1900-1960," under the direction of Judith Walzer Leavitt. When she is not working on her dissertation she is instigating department happy hours.
Dana A. Freiburger (e-mail|website): Dana enjoys broad interests in the history of science and technology situated in the United States and Japan during the past 150 years. His current research includes an examination of Catholic science education in 19thC America and the impact of scientific instruments on the physical sciences in Japan during the post-Meiji period.
Bennet M. Goldstein (e-mail): In general, I am drawn to topics of a taboo and stigmatized nature. I am currently investigating medical discourses from the early 20th century that surround psychopathology and sexual perversions, including homosexuality. Using medical literature, psychiatric records, and vernacular culture as sources, I wish to determine the presence of psychiatric internment and treatment of same-sex sexual behavior within patients. By highlighting sexual perversion, I hope to contextualize and reflect on the interactions among mental illness, diagnosis, and patient construction of self-identity.
Judith Kaplan (e-mail): I am interested in methods in the social and historical sciences, especially statistics and comparative linguistics. My dissertation examines language science and Orientalism in late-nineteenth century Germany.
Bradley Moore: Brad focuses on Modern Central European social, political, and medical history. His dissertation project explores the impacts of Stalinism on the science, development, and practice of public health in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956. Brad seeks to gain a more complete understanding of the communist vision of a healthy socialist citizen, the manners in which ideology succeeds and/or fails in its attempts to manipulate medical science, and the methods of power and influence which society and professionals still wield under authoritarian conditions.
Blair Nelson: Blair is working on the mid-nineteenth-century American controversy over the origin of human racial differences, especially how that debate played out in the popular religious press. Many ethnologists in Europe and America had rejected the notion of the descent of all humans from the same original couple, and argued that each human race had a separate and geographically distinct creation. Americans could be proud that even Europeans acknowledged the U. S. ethnologists lead in this field of research. But few in American's Protestant community celebrated what was an overt attack on the orthodox understanding of the unity of humankind. This became the most contented issue regarding religion and science from 1850 into the 1870s.
Sarah Boxhorn Potratz: I am interested in the history of medicine in America, especially in public health during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Currently I am working on a history of rickets as a public health concern during the first three decades of the 20th century. I hope to expand and develop this work for my master's thesis. I am also interested in the history of the book, and of publishing and printing more generally. I come into this program with my Master of Library Studies from UW-Madison and currently work in the Special Collections in Memorial Library. I enjoy cooking and cocktails, knitting, and Agatha Christie mysteries.
Scott Prinster (website): Scott's interests include exploring the boundaries and interactions between what is widely acknowledged as "science" and other disciplines occupying the edges of scientific thought. This includes the interchange between religion and science, especially during the Protestant Reformation; the effects of ideology on science, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia; and the coalescence of science in the late medieval and early modern periods.
Megan Raby (website): My research interests center on the role of place in shaping scientific knowledge as well as the intersection between the history of science and environmental history. I am currently working on a dissertation on US tropical biology in the Caribbean in the late-nineteenth and 20th early centuries. This dissertation will focus on US tropical research stations, such as Harvard's Botanical Station for Tropical Research and Sugarcane Investigation, Cuba, and the Canal Zone Biological Area at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. My research will trace the international relations of science in the Caribbean as US biologists moved from utilizing the existing networks of European colonial science toward developing their own, with the aid of US corporations, after the Spanish American War and construction of the Panama Canal. In addition, I am interested in how tropical field stations brought together researchers from an array of biological disciplines, and may have fostered the development of what we would today call "biodiversity studies." I am a CHANGE (Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment) fellow and CHE (Center for Culture, History, and Environment) graduate student affiliate.
Lynnette Regouby (e-mail): Lynnette Regouby is currently researching connections between concepts of climate and constructions of plant and human bodies during the eighteenth century. She is interested in applying a history of science mediated by history of the body to uncover how eighteenth century developments in climate theory and in physiology informed constructions of political, cultural, and corporeal difference in this crucial period of European expansion. She is especially interested in the role that analogies play in eighteenth century epistemology, both for the conceptual content they reveal about bodies on both sides of the equation and for the representative strategies such comparative approaches enabled. Lynnette completed her MA thesis at the University of Oklahoma in 2006, entitled "The Limits of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's Vision of Climate, Cultivation and Culture in the Spanish Colonies." In her spare time, she volunteers for the GECC and contributes clandestinely to Librivox.
Katie Robinson: Broadly speaking, I work on the history of medicine in the 20th century. More specifically, I am interested in how gender and socioeconomic inequalities operate within two areas. The first includes the history of obesity, bariatric surgery and food addiction, as well as cosmetic bodily alteration and the embodiment of identity. The second area incorporates the history of psychiatry and institutionalization, spatial marginalization of communities, and the differential burden of diseases, infectious and otherwise, within these populations. I approach these topics through popular media and culture, utilizing oral histories, film, and magazines as well as archival sources. As an M.D./Ph.D. candidate, I plan to specialize in addiction psychiatry and to incorporate patient narratives in my work whenever possible.
Andrew Ruis (website):Andrew’s interests are in the history of medicine, public health, and health policy. His master’s thesis, “Bringing the Laboratory to the Street: The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Diphtheria in Late Nineteenth-Century New York City,” received an Honorable Mention for the Shryock Award of the American Association for the History of Medicine. His dissertation, Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: School Foodservice & Public Health Nutrition in Early Twentieth-Century America, examines the development of school lunch and nutrition programs for children from their beginnings in the mid-19th century to the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946.
Andrew Stuhl (e-mail | blog): I view socio-ecological systems through the lenses of environmental history and history of science, asking what human and natural histories offer to understanding and solving today's environmental problems. My research interests include North American natural and cultural resource management in the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of history in decision-making, leadership studies, and environmental education. My dissertation project will investigate the environmental and cultural history of resource extraction in the Canadian Arctic to comprehend changing land-use patterns, knowledge production, and cultural conflict in the region. This research will focus on encounters among Inuvialuit natives in the Beaufort-Delta region with non-native whalers, trappers, traders, and oil developers over the last two centuries. Ultimately, I hope gaining a richer historical context of the patterns of resource extraction will inform the paths of sustainable development, cultural preservation, and environmental management in the Arctic.
Peter Susalla: I am interested in the history of the physical sciences, especially astronomy and cosmology in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Scott Trigg: Scott works on the history of Arabic science in the pre-modern Middle East, and is currently pursuing the Joint Ph.D. between the History and History of Science departments. His M.A. thesis looked at two Arabic medical writings on the relationship between health and the environment, particularly in the case of travel and new environs. As he prepares for the Ph.D. his general interests include the history of astronomy and planetary theory, the transmission of scientific knowledge, and the social and institutional contexts of Arabic science.
Amrys O. Williams: I am interested in bringing together the history of science and technology and environmental history, as well as understanding urban and rural perspectives on scientific and technological issues. My current project looks at the development of 4-H clubs in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on ideas of modernity and of bodily and environmental health.
Shannon Withycombe: Shannon Withycombe's interests include the history of women's health, history of sexuality, and the history of the body. Her dissertation examines the meaning, both linguistically and conceptually, of miscarriage in late nineteenth-century America. She has previously investigated the intersections of motherhood and insanity in the nineteenth-century asylum. Currently, Shannon is involved in seeking out funding opportunities for graduate students in need of new shoes, and is also setting up a contest for the best title of a dissertation on miscarriage. Cash prizes may be available.
Anna Zeide: My interests currently lie in the areas of environmental history and the history of ecology, the history of twentieth century life sciences, the history of science education, and the history of food, biotechnology, and agriculture. And at the end of such a long list, I'm really excited about how all these different areas interact with one another, how science and environmental thinking relate to one another, how the history of science can be used to teach science in schools, the role of science in society, people's perceptions of how, why, and by whom science is done, and more!