How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson’s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. We had … Continue reading Banking on the Body: An Interview
In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain’s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentieth Century guides readers through a transformation in American science and nature museums as museums moved from a nineteenth-century focus on research and specimen collections to a twentieth-century emphasis on … Continue reading Life on Display: An Interview
Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine … Continue reading Chromatic Algorithms: An Interview
Ann C. Pizzorusso’s new book is a creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history of Italy from the Etruscans to Da Vinci and beyond. You can listen to us talking about … Continue reading Tweeting Da Vinci: An Interview
Robert Stoltz’s fascinating book Bad Water explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan, guiding readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan while charting the transformations of an “environmental unconscious” lying at the foundation of modern social and political thought. Robert and I had a chance to talk about it for the New Books in East Asian Studies podcast, and you can listen to our conversation here. Continue reading Bad Water: An Interview
Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) and T.H. Huxley (1825-95) as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice … Continue reading Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: An Interview
Last week I was fortunate enough to participate in a session of the Sawyer Seminar on Critical Silk Road Studies at Georgetown organized by the wonderful Jim Millward and Michelle Wang. The seminars take the form of discussions (catered this time with delicious wine, dinnerfood, and cupcakes) of pre-circulated papers, prefaced by brief introductions by the authors (in this case, Pierce Salguero and me) and a commentary … Continue reading Working Paper – “Paper Dolls: An Architectonics of Translation in Early Modern Eurasia”
John Protevi’s new book creates a wonderfully stimulating dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi’s work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). You can listen to … Continue reading Life, War, Earth: An Interview
In two recent books, Greg Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. They’re books for anyone with an interest in the history of disaster, of the context of Fukushima, and of modern Japan, and we talked about both of them here. Continue reading Seismic Japan and When the Earth Roars: An Interview
David Livingstone’s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts. This wonderful book locates evolutionary debates in particular sites and situations as a way of understanding the history of science in terms of “geographies of reading” and “speech spaces,” and you can listen to our … Continue reading Dealing with Darwin: An Interview
Carla Nappi 