HPS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
- History of the
Job Titles:
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
Job Titles:
- Member of the Teaching Officers Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Dániel Margócsy studies the cultural history of early modern science, medicine and technology. He has taught at Northwestern University and at Hunter College, the City University of New York, and has held fellowships at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. He received his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2009.
His latest book, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions, studies the reception history of the first major atlas of anatomy from its moment of publication to today. It is based on a comprehensive survey of the annotations, underlinings and marks of ownership that readers left in the over seven hundred surviving copies of the first two editions.
His first book, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, 2014) examined the impact of global trade on cultural production in the 17th and 18th centuries. It explores how commercial networks played a crucial role in the growth and transmission of empirical knowledge; and how commercial secrecy and marketing transformed the public sphere and the Republic of Letters.
His current projects include a study of the reception of Machiavelli in World War II, the role of scale in historical writings, a collaborative project on the relationship between transportation technologies and the circulation of knowledge, and a book-length study tentatively titled Transportations: Cosmologies of Logistics in the Dutch Colonial World.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
Job Titles:
- Member of the Teaching Officers Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Lauren Kassell holds a BA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Haverford College; an MSc in Economic and Social History, University of Oxford; and a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She came to Cambridge as a research fellow at Pembroke College in 1998, then took up a lectureship in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 2000. She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2003-4. She is Director of the Casebooks Project (2008-19) and one of the co-applicants of the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on Generation to Reproduction (2004-14). She was a founding director of the MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society that launched in 2017, and co-director of research for Cambridge Digital Humanities from 2018 to 2021. She was the historical consultant for Astrologaster, a story-driven comedy game inspired by Simon Forman's casebooks, released on iOS and PC in 2019. She was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in May 2019 and a distinguished visiting professor in the Department of History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University from January to June 2020. She was shortlisted in the categories of Research and Leadership for the AHRC/Wellcome 2020 Medical Humanities Awards.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
- History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Dr Helen Anne Curry: History of 20th and 21st century science and technology, including biology and biotechnology
Job Titles:
- Member of the Teaching Officers Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Job Titles:
- Member of the Research Fellows and Teaching Associates Team
- Early Modern Life Sciences and Medicine in Global Contexts
Dr Dmitriy Myelnikov: History of medicine and the life sciences in the 20th century
Job Titles:
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Job Titles:
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
We also have a team of part-time invigilators to help staff the Library in the evenings, so you will see a variety of faces at the desk.
Job Titles:
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Job Titles:
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Nick Jardine was the principal investigator on the AHRC-funded project Diagrams, Figures and the Transformation of Astronomy, 1450-1650.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Peter Murray Jones is a Fellow and former Librarian of King's College, Cambridge. He was one of the co-applicants of the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on 'Generation to Reproduction', headed by Nick Hopwood.
In 2005 he was a co-organiser of the Cambridge Illuminations exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and in 2004 curated The Art of Medicine exhibition at the Beinecke Library, Yale.
Professor Sachiko Kusukawa (Trinity College): History of science; cultural and intellectual history; the history of the book
Sir George Howard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood, was born on 9 th July 1845. He gained a mathematical scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge in 1864, graduating in 1868 as 2 nd wrangler and winner of the 2 nd Smith's prize. Although he decided on a career in the law, and was called to the Bar in 1872, ill-health caused his return to Cambridge, where he devoted the rest of his life to mathematical science. Here he was instrumental in the teaching of advanced mathematics and the growth of the geophysical sciences. Through his work on the physics of the earth and tidal theory, he became a leading authority on tides, and amongst his many achievements he was Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, and President of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1905 he became a knight commander of the Order of the Bath after his presidency of the BAAS on its tour of South Africa. He won both the Royal Medal (in 1884) and the highest scientific distinction, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, in 1911. In 1907, Cambridge University Press sought to publish George Darwin's Scientific Papers as a definitive collection of his works, to join the collected papers of such eminent scientists as George Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin and J.C. Adams. The first 4 volumes were published under Darwin's own supervision, the last in May 1911, with a 5 th volume following in 1916. George Darwin died in Cambridge on 7 th December 1912. His influence was perhaps best remembered by Sir Harold Jeffreys in 1924 in the Preface to The Earth, where he dedicated his classic work to Darwin, "father of modern geophysics and cosmogony."
This display features items acquired in 2015 and once owned by George Darwin, along with related books already in the Whipple's collections. They provide an insight into Darwin's studies as a student and his later research at Cambridge, and into how he developed his theories of the physics of the earth, the evolution of the solar system and the nature of tides. Darwin's links to other leading scientific figures also emerge, notably his close friendship with Lord Kelvin and his brother James. Some of these items are signed and dated by Darwin and many are annotated, allowing a glimpse of his reactions to other publications and of his own mathematical workings. All except one of these works were authored by graduates of Cambridge, allowing them to be viewed within the changing field of mathematical study at the University during the 19 th century.