New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
04 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? St...
Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
30 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer t...
Jorg Matthias Determann, “Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2015)
29 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and re...
Dan Bouk, “How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
23 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Pre...
Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015)
19 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of elec...
Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015)
15 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper ...
Peter A. Shulman, “Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
09 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Peter A. Shulman‘s new book is a fascinating history of the emergence of a connection between energy (in the form of coal), national interests, and ...
Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
04 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. Th...
Colin Milburn, “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter” (Duke UP, 2015)
27 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Colin Milburn’s wonderful new book looks carefully and imaginatively at the relationship between nanotechnology and play. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games ...
Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net”
13 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, ps...
James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015)
06 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in hi...
Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015)
02 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to po...
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015)
28 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford Univer...
Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015)
26 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whet...
Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015)
22 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature...
Ryan Craig, "College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education" (Palgrave McMillan, 2015)
21 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
AirBnB has dramatically altered the landscape for the hotel, tourism, and real estate sectors. Uber and Lyft have done the same to transportation. But...
Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
15 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a d...
Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015)
10 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade l...
Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
04 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Sandra Harding‘s new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions ...
Liz McFall, “Devising Consumption Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending” (Routledge, 2014)
02 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The role of financial services in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Econ...
Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
30 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Pr...
Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920” (Stanford UP, 2015)
25 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal...
Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015)
25 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a m...
Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013)
19 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Drugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In ex...
Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014)
14 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious ...
Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
10 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components ...
Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
10 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the ...
Eva Hemmungs Wirten, “Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information” (U of Chicago, 2015)
01 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
When we study the history of a famous scientific figure – especially one that has gone on to become a cultural icon – we are dealing not just with...
Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
24 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attent...
Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
17 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Coopersmith‘s new book takes readers through the century-and-a-half-long history of the fax machine and the technologies that shaped and we...
Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015)
08 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Explori...
James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
03 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambri...
Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014)
03 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: ...
M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
15 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. ...
Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013)
14 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the hist...
Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015)
12 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and kn...
Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013)
08 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “...
John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015)
01 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considere...
Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014)
26 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating foren...
Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015)
25 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post ...
Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
19 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, than...
Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015)
18 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the ...
Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)
10 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others co...
Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
10 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of...
Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)
05 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital...
Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)
01 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of conten...
Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013)
27 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heat...
Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)
20 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the pr...
Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)
17 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really need...
Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)
13 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (Un...
Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014)
06 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the dep...
A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
21 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Moder...
Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014)
16 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowled...
Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014)
09 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book...
Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014)
05 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner...
Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
23 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwi...
Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015)
20 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Impe...
Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014)
18 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing ...
Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
10 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew i...
Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
30 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockey...
Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
16 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 educati...
Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)
24 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promot...
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)
14 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter...
Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
11 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Productio...
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
09 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Pet...
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
03 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014)
27 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other thi...
William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
13 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Tu...
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)
07 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-1...
Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013)
06 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one an...
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
05 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
30 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reas...
Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014)
20 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014)
09 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. ...
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)
02 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 ...
Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
01 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of te...
Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
11 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the ...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
05 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid ninet...
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
22 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up n...
Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
16 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worl...
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
16 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the s...
David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
06 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the sam...
William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013)
30 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Bill Connolly‘s new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores th...
Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French ...
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014)
22 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Select...
Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
14 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Bas...
Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014)
09 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an ...
Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014)
09 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelm...
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
04 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the e...
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
20 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, ...
Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014)
12 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also hel...
David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013)
05 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way,...
Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
02 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Omar W. 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....
Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)
29 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to sa...
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
23 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach ...
Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014)
18 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discover...
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
14 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, a...
danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)
12 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, ...
Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
26 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold...
Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
16 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds,...