Tag: History and Images

Podcasts

Commercial Visions: An Interview

Dániel Margócsy’s beautiful new book explores the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. We had a chance to talk about it recently for the New Books in STS podcast, and you can find our conversation … Continue reading Commercial Visions: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Paper Knowledge: An Interview

Lisa Gitelman’s new book introduces readers to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, it curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” You can listen to us talk about hit here. Continue reading Paper Knowledge: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Observing by Hand: An Interview

In Omar Nasim’s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. His book examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. We had a chance to talk about … Continue reading Observing by Hand: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Essays

Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay: An Essay

What has it looked like to translate expletives and curses across languages, and what might we learn from looking closely at an example of a text that tries to do just that? I recently (and very briefly) wrote about this phenomenon in the context of a Qing-era pentaglot dictionary. My thoughts on this text and phenomenon are very much in-progress, but you can find a snapshot … Continue reading Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay: An Essay

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Embryos Under the Microscope: An Interview

Jane Maienschein’s great new book traces the history of transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Embryos Under the Microscope is equally suited to both academic historians and a broader interested public, carefully curating the elements of the narrative such that they collectively inform broader debates over embryo-related policy in the contemporary United States. You can find our conversation about it here. Continue reading Embryos Under the Microscope: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Screen of Kings: An Interview

Craig Clunas’s new book is a wonderfully and productively revisionist account of Ming history and its artifacts. Screen of Kings emphasizes the importance of members of the Ming imperial clan (i.e., those who were NOT emperors) and their courts as sites of cultural innovation, production, and reproduction, and of Ming kings as producers, collectors, and patrons of the arts. You can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Screen of Kings: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Catching Nature in the Act: An Interview

Mary Terrall’s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. It is a must-read for historians of science, and as a bonus it also includes descriptions of frog pants, chickens wearing stockings, and mittens made of spider silk. You can find our conversation about it here. Continue reading Catching Nature in the Act: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Alien Phenomenology: An Interview

Ian Bogost’s wonderful book introduces readers to the field of object-oriented ontology by asking us to consider a fundamental question: why do we ignore “stuff” in scholarship, poetry, science, or business as anything more than a way to continue talking about humans? Is there a way to think and live with stuff in the world that doesn’t reduce it to that which concerns people, but instead … Continue reading Alien Phenomenology: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi