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Dibner Fellows 2002 - 2003

Dibner Institute Senior Fellows

Robert P. Crease is a Professor at SUNY, Stony Brook and also an Historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is the author of Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946-1972, (1999) and, with Robert Serber, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life at the Frontiers of Science, (1998). At the Dibner Institute he will continue his work on a new volume of the history of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, covering the period from 1973-1997.

Robert DiSalle, Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, works primarily on the history and philosophy of modern physics. His recent publications include: "Newton's Philosophical Analysis of Space and Time," The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I.B. Cohen and G. E. Smith (2002); "Conventionalism and Modern Physics: A Re-Assessment," Noûs 36 (2002); and "Reconsidering Kant, Friedman, Logical Positivism, and the Exact Sciences", Philosophy of Science 69 (2002). While at the Dibner Institute he continues his work on the evolution of theories of space and time, in a project titled "Conceptual Analysis and the Conceptual Development of Modern Physics."

Stephan R. Epstein, Professor at the London School of Economics, has written Freedom and Growth, Markets and States in Europe, 1300-1750 (2000) and An Island for Itself. Economic Development and Social Transformation in Late Medieval Sicily (1992). The proposed title for his work while at the Dibner Institute is "Systems for the Production and Diffusion of Technical Knowledge in Europe, 1250-1750."

Jeanne Guillemin is Professor at Boston College and has also been a Senior Fellow at MIT for the past two years. She is the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (1999) and Mixed Blessings: Intensive Care for Newborns (revised 1991) as well as numerous articles on arms control, weapons, and anthrax. Her project while at the Dibner Institute is titled "Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Sir Paul Gordon Fildes: Science, Anthrax, and the Initiation of the UK Biological Weapons Program."

Jeff Horn, Professor at Manhattan College, is the author of the forthcoming work, "Who Speaks for the Nation?: Elections and Elites in Southern Champagne, 1765-1830," and an article written with Margaret Jacob, "Jean-Antoine Chaptal and the Cultural Roots of French Industrialization," Technology and Culture (1998). While at the Dibner Institute he will continue his research for a work titled "The Path Not Taken: French Industrial Policy in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830."

Akihiro Kanamori is Professor of Mathematics at Boston University. In addition to The Higher Infinite (1997) and numerous papers in technical set theory, he has written extensively on the historical development of set theory, including, with Menachem Magidor, The Evolution of Large Cardinal Axioms in Set Theory, Higher Set Theory (Proceedings 1977). At the Dibner Institute he plans to complete co-authored chapters on the early and more recent history of set theory for the forthcoming "A History of Mathematical Logic" and continue work toward a second volume of The Higher Infinite, focusing on developments within the last 25 years.

Evelyn Keller, Professor at MIT and a MacArthur Fellow (1992-1997), has received many honors, most recently the Medal of the Italian Senate. Her books in the history of biology include A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983, 1993); Refiguring Life: Metaphors of 20th Century Biology (1995); The Century of the Gene (2000) and most recently, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. The title for her next work is "Subjectivity in the Human Sciences of the late Twentieth Century."

Patrick Malone is Professor of Urban Studies and American Civilization, Brown University. He is the author, with Robert B. Gordon, of The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (1996) and The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (1993). He will continue work on his book titled "Waterpower in Lowell, 1821-1885" while he is at the Dibner Institute.

Giuliano Pancaldi is Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the author of the forthcoming Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, and published Darwin in Italy: Science Across Cultural Frontiers in 1991. His work while at the Dibner Institute is titled "Enlightenment, Diversity, and the Cultures of Science and Technology."

George E. Smith, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, is the author of "J.J. Thomson and the Electron, 1897-1899," to appear in the forthcoming volume, The Electron and the Birth of Microphysics and "From the Phenomenon of the Ellipse to an Inverse-Square Force: Why Not?" to appear in a Festschrift for Howard Stein. He plans to work on two projects at the Dibner Institute: (1) exploration of how Newton's Principia provided a new way for the development of high-quality evidence in science and (2) the study of works in the history of chemistry from Lavoisier to the emergence of the periodic table and the development of organic chemistry in the second half of the 19th century.

Emily Thompson is the author of The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT, 2002), and co-editor, with Peter Galison, of The Architecture of Science (MIT, 1999). She is currently studying the role of technicians in the transformation to sound film in the American motion picture industry in the late 1920s.

Richard Yeo is Professorial Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. He is the author of Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture, 1800-1860 (2001)and Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (2001). He plans to write on the subject, "Managing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe 1650-1800" while he is at the Dibner Institute.

Dibner Institute Senior Visiting Research Fellows

Constance Barsky is Director, Program in Learning by Redesign, The Ohio State University. She is the author, with Kenneth Wilson, of two articles which appeared in The One Culture: A Conversation About Science, ed. Labinger and Collins: "From Social Construction to Questions for Research: The Promise of the Sociology of Science" and "Beyond Social Construction." At the Dibner In she will be working with Kenneth Wilson on a catalog of technological history.

Kenneth Wilson, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the renormalization group, is Youngberg Professor in the Physics Department, The Ohio State University. He is the author, with B. Daviss of Redesigning Education (1994) and Broken Scale Invariance and the Light Cone, coedited with M. Gell-Mann (1971). At the Dibner Institute, he will be working on two projects: the first, connected with the Sloan-Dibner project in the History of Recent Science and Technology, will explore the conditions requisite for community-wide, sustained developments in science and technology; the second, with Constance Barsky, will be to initiate a catalog of socio-technological transformations.

Dibner Institute Postdoctoral Fellows

Nimrod Bar-Am received the Ph.D. with distinction from Tel Aviv University in 2000. This past year he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Haifa University, Israel, where he developed the forthcoming article, "Demarcation Problems in Linguistics," to be published in Conceptus. His research proposal while he is at the Dibner Institute is titled "Formalization and Induction: The Background to the Rise of Boolean Logic."

Alain Bernard is currently a Teacher of Mathematics in the secondary school at Lycée Apollinaire and an Instructor of the History of Mathematics at Versailles-Saint Quentin University, France. His article, "Sophistic Aspects of Pappus' Collections," is to appear in Archive for the History of Exact Sciences. He has also written "Ancient Rhetoric and Greek Mathematic: a Response to a Modern Historiographical Dilemma," forthcoming in Science in Context. His research proposal while he is at the Dibner Institute is titled "Rhetoric and Mathematical Practice in Late Antiquity."

Elizabeth Cavicchi received her Ed.D. from the the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she was a Lecturer and developed courses in teaching science. She is the author, with P. Lucht and F. Hughes-McDonnell, of "Playing with Light," Educational Action Research (2001) and "Experimenting with Magnetism: Ways of Learning of Joann and Faraday," American Journal of Physics (1997) and will present a paper at the 2002 Bakken Museum Conference on the lightening rod. For her Dibner Institute project, she is conducting research on induction-coil-making by 19th-century amateurs, and on the educational and historical ramifications of replicating their experiments.

François Charette recently defended his dissertation, "Mathematical Instrumentation in 14th-Century Egypt and Syria" for the Program in History of Science, Frankfurt University, Germany. He has written a chapter, "Islamic Astrolabes," for the forthcoming "Astrolabes at Greenwich. A Catalogue of the Planispheric Astrolabes in the National Maritime Museum," ed. K. van Cleempoel. His project while at the Dibner Institute is titled "The Visual Language of Islamic Science."

Guido Giglioni defended his dissertation, "Francis Glisson, Physician and Philosopher. An Investigation of the Life of Nature in 17th Century England," at Johns Hopkins University, Spring, 2002. He contributed the article, "The Language of Imagination in Jan Baptiste van Helmont and Francis Glisson," for the volume, Medical Latin From the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Bracke and Deumens. His research proposal while he is at the Dibner Institute is titled "Helmontianism and Late 17th-Century Anatomy: the Case of Francis Glisson."

Abigail Lustig received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science. She is the author of "Sex, Death, and Evolution in Proto-and Metazoa 1876-1913," Journal of the History of Biology 33 (2000). She is the editor, with Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, of the forthcoming "Darwinian Heresies," for which she contributed the article, "Natural Atheology and Evolutionary Explanations for the Origins of Religion." Her project, while at the Dibner Institute, is titled "Altruism, Biology, and Society."

Aren Maeir is an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology, Department of Land of Israel Studies, Bar Ilan University, Israel. He is the author, with C. Ehrlich, of the article, "Excavating Philistine Gath: Have We Found Goliath's Hometown," in Biblical Archaeology Review (2001) and "Does Size Count? Urban and Cultic Perspectives on the Rural Landscape during the Middle Bronze II Period" in The Rural Landscape of Ancient Israel, BAR International Series. His research while at the Dibner Institute is titled "Changing Technologies in a World in Transition: The Development of Philistine Culture and Technology during the Iron Age."

Alberto Martinez received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and is currently the Dibner Library Resident Scholar, Smithsonian Institution. He was an Organizer for the Seminar on the Investigation of Difficult Things, 1999-2000 and for the Seminar on Natural Philosophy, 1996, both at the University of Minnesota and has been a participant in the Seven Pines Symposium for History and Philosophy of Physics, 1997, 1999. At the Dibner Institute he will prepare a book on the history of kinematics, the modern science of motion.

H. Darrel Rutkin, received his thesis at Indiana Universit. He is the author of the article, "Celestial Offerings: Astrological Motifs in the Dedicatory Letters of Galileo's Siderus Nuncius and Kepler's Astronomia Nova," in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Grafton and Newman (2001). At the Dibner Institute he proposes to develop a book on the place of astrology in premodern western science, c.1250-1500.

Alison Sandman received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of "Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain," forthcoming in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Early Modern Europe and "Educating Pilots: Licensing Exams, Cosmography Classes, and the Universidad de Mareantes in 16th-Century Spain," forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Ninth International Reunion for the History of Nautical Science and Hydography. During her fellowship year at the Dibner Institute she will conduct a comparative study of navigation and cosmography of the major sixteenth-century European sea powers: Portugal, Spain, and England.

Yunli Shi is Professor, Department of History of Science, University of Science and Technology of China, from which he received his Ph.D. He is the author of several books in Chinese, including History of Astronomy in China and the forthcoming "Chinese Astronomy and the Importation of Western Knowledge." His most recent article in English is "The Korean Adaptation of the Chinese-Islamic Tables," forthcoming in Archive for History of Exact Sciences. His research project at the Dibner Institute is titled "European Background of Jesuit Predictive Astronomy in 18th Century China."

Christopher Smeenk defends his dissertation, "Approaching the Absolute Zero of Time: Theory Development and Evaluation in Early Universe Cosmology," at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author, with John Earman, of "Take a Ride on a Time Machine," to appear in "Reverberations of the Shaky Game," edited by Jones and Ehrlich, and he is assistant editor, with J. Renn, M. Schemmel, and C. Martin of the forthcoming two-volume work, "The Genesis of General Relativity." The title of his work while at the Dibner Institute is "An Inflationary Field: The Heyday of Early Universe Cosmology."

Dibner Institute Graduate Fellows

Brendan Foley, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, received an M.A. from Tufts University in 1995 and an M.S. in Maritime Archaeology from the University of Southhampton, U.K. His dissertation for MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society studies the increasingly professional role of the mechanical engineers who studied at the United States Naval Academy, from the end of the Civil War until 1890.

Jeremiah James received the B.A. from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland and will receive the Ph.D. from the History of Science Department, Harvard University. He is the author of the forthcoming article, "Disunifying Science: The Fragmentation of the Pauling Program," Chemical Heritage Foundation Magazine. His dissertation will examine the development of new research programs and their identities as scientific disciplines, built upon work done by Linus Pauling in the 1930s.

Montgomery Link received the M.T.S. from the Boston University School of Theology and the B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, with Grossi, Makkai, and Parsons, of the article "A Bibliography of Hao Wang," Philosophia Mathematica (1998). Enrolled in the doctoral program, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, he is writing his thesis on "The Mathematical History of the Canonization of First Order Logic as the Formal Language of Set Theory."

David Lucsko is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and is enrolled in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. His dissertation is a study of the wants and needs of those who choose to modify their automobiles for enhanced performance, the so-called "high-performance aftermarket" or "hot rod industry." It is titled "Performance Tuning: The Evolution of a Modern Craft."

Eden Miller graduated from Princeton University, where she majored in Electrical Engineering, concentrating on signal and image processing. She is the author of the book review titled "Decrypting Mathematics" about In Code, forthcoming in Technology and Society. Her dissertation builds upon her MIT award-winning paper titled "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile."

Chen Pang Yeang received the B.S. from National Taiwan University and the Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is now enrolled in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is the author, with W. He, of the paper, "How the Magnetic Core Memory became a Core Memory in the Digital Computer," submitted to Technology and Culture. The title of his thesis is "Transmission, Reception, and Interference: Radio Technology and Science, 1900-1940."