PODCAST

New Books in the History of Science

New Books Network

Interviews with historians of science about their new books

arts books

All Episodes

77:42

Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/07/02

On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon

45:32

Sarah Bull, "Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/30

What is the relationship between medicine and commerce? In Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah Bull, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the relationships between doctors, sexual reform campaigners, publishers and pornography in the Victorian era. The book charts the struggle to differentiate and define medicine from ‘quackery’, in the context of the rise

99:16

Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/30

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life. The pair talk about how the new book connects to Matt’s earlier book, Engineers for Change; how what Matt calls “innovation expertise” first emerged; how government played a key role in promoting the idea of innovation; how the idea of innovation was democratized from focusing on elite white

61:29

Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, "Battle of the Big...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/30

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from

55:12

Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse:...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/24

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect

54:00

Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/22

Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe’s rebirth. The Renaissance was

79:58

Jeremy Stolow, "Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography"...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/20

Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This rich, interdisciplinary study by Dr. Stolow chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put

53:05

Laura Frances Goffman, "Disorder and Diagnosis:...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/19

Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region--Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian

40:38

Violet Moller, "Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/18

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic.But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined. From the icy Danish

36:24

Kathleen Miller, ed., "Doctrine and Disease in the...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/03

Kathleen Miller talks about her new edited volume, Doctrine and Disease in British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press, 2025). In the sixteenth century, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious beliefs as well as the colonial agendas they were often ensnared in.This interdisciplinary volume follows the contours of illness, epidemics, and cures in the early modern British and

83:53

Beth Linker on Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/02

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, about her recent book, Slouch: Postural Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024). Slouch examines the history of conceptions of “bad posture” as they arose over the course of the 20th century. The book is a beautiful example of taking a perhaps seemingly small topic and showing how

45:11

Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/06/02

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed—and why having XX or XY chromosomes isn’t as conclusive as some would have us believe.In this lively and

59:12

Jack Ashby, "Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/05/31

In Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums (Penguin, 2025), zoologist Jack Ashby shares hidden stories behind the world’s iconic natural history museums, from enormous mounted whale skeletons to cabinets of impossibly tiny insects.Look closely and all is not as it seems: these museums are not as natural, Ashby shows us, as we might think. Mammals dominate the displays, for example, even though they make up less than 1 percent of species; there are many more male

75:09

Matthew Shindell, "Lunar: A History of the Moon in...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/05/22

The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed

54:27

From Hal to Siri: How Computers Learned to Speak

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/05/19

Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he’s currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing. In this conversation, we explore: the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey 2001’s strong influence on computer science

64:24

Andrew Griebeler, "Botanical Icons: Critical...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/05/12

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes

56:34

Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Media and the Mind: Art,...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/04/30

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks

72:47

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/04/23

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex

41:46

Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/04/17

Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?”The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a

47:33

Sally King, "Menstrual Myth Busting: The Case of the...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2025/04/02

In Menstrual Myth Busting: The Case of the Hormonal Female (Policy Press, 2025), Dr. Sally King interrogates the diagnostic label of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) to expose and challenge sexist assumptions within medical research and practice. She powerfully demonstrates how the concept of the ‘hormonal’ premenstrual woman is merely the latest iteration of the ‘hysterical’ female myth. By blaming the healthy reproductive body (first our wombs, now our hormones) for the female-prevalence of emotional

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