THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Affiliate Member of the Department of History
PhD 2022 (History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science) University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of Philology and the Human Sciences; German and Central European History; History of Science and Knowledge in Modern and Early Modern Europe (including Britain); the Global History of “modern” Science; Science, Culture, and Society; Science and Gender; American Astronomy and Astrophysics (19th- 20th- Centuries)
BIOGRAPHY
Kristine Palmieri is a historian of Science and Knowledge in the German- and English-speaking worlds after 1700. Her research focuses on the history of scholarly practices and research methods, the mutually constitutive relationship between science and society, as well as the embeddedness of knowledge in specific cultural and political contexts. These foci provide a unifying framework for her work on the history of philology in Germany, the history of the human sciences in Europe (including Britain), and the history of women in science. Kristine also has longstanding interests in the history of European encounters with “others” and new interests in the history of Astronomy and Astrophysics as well as the global history of “modern” science.
Kristine earned her PhD at the University of Chicago jointly in the Department of History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences (Amsterdam), and the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (Halle). Her research has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the University of Chicago Women’s Board, and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, among others.
Kristine publishes in both English and German. Her most recent article appeared in the Spring 2023 Volume of History of Humanities. Her reviews can be found in publications ranging from Isis and The British Journal for the History of Science to The Quarterly Review of Biology and The Classical Review.
At the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, Kristine is currently working on her first monograph, Nurseries of Progress: Classical Philology and the Research Seminar in Germany, 1700-1870. This book illuminates the foundational and formative role that classical philology played in the development of the sciences in Germany through a braided analysis that pursues three lines of inquiry. First, it explains how philology seminars came to cultivate a distinctive research culture and scholarly ethos in the Eighteenth Century. It then traces the dissemination of the seminar model and examines how this influenced the development of the sciences in nineteenth-century Germany before 1870. Finally, it foregrounds the ways in which classical philology’s increasing scientific legitimacy and institutional authority, as well as its growing educational and cultural significance, simultaneously contributed to and were influenced by larger political, socio-cultural, and intellectual phenomena.
At the University of Chicago, Kristine is also a member of the Capturing the Stars Research Group. As part of this interdisciplinary team, she has been working to reconstruct both the scientific contributions and the lived experiences of women who worked at Yerkes Observatory in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Her contributions are designed to demonstrate the ways in which women’s labor was essential for the advancement of astronomy and astrophysics, while also challenging contemporary notions about what it means to do science and who “counts” as a scientist.
With Andrea Twiss-Brooks (University of Chicago Library), she is curating an exhibit for the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center: “Capturing the Stars: The Untold History of Women at Yerkes Observatory.” The exhibit features contributions from undergraduate student collaborators and opens September 18, 2023.
The 7th Biennial Kathleen A. Zar Symposium on “Invisible Labor in Astronomy and Astrophysics,” organized by the research group, will coincide with the exhibit’s instillation.
NEWS
Selected by The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society as one of 13 new collaborative research projects for 2023-24, Feb 2023
Women Capturing the Stars in the University of Chicago Library News, Feb 2023
Awarded a University of Chicago Women's Board Grant, together with Rich Kron, Professor Emeritus, Elisabeth Long, and Andrea Twiss-Brooks, for work on the Yerkes Observatory for 2022-23