Princeton University, PhD '18

BIOGRAPHY

Emily Kern is a historian of science, with a specialty in the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the life sciences. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Her current book project, The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, explores how the African continent became the “cradle of humankind” and the pre-eminent site for human evolutionary research that it is today. Until the 1950s, it was generally believed that the human species first evolved in Asia, not Africa—an idea that was deeply rooted in European intellectual traditions and continued to draw historians and scientists to the archive, the laboratory, and the Asian field well into the twentieth century. The Cradle of Humanity argues that the story of humanity’s African origin is linked necessarily with the transformation of Africa itself as an object of historical and scientific inquiry. Foregrounding the changing geography of human origins in this history also makes clear that ideas about where humankind emerged often came before explanations for how evolution functioned, and that ideas about place, race, and world history shaped how scientists thought about biological mechanisms and the human species.

Kern is also co-editing the forthcoming volume New Earth Histories with Alison Bashford (UNSW) and Adam Bobbette (Glasgow). Situated at the intersection of the history of the earth
and environmental sciences, New Earth Histories explores the significance of multiple ideas of geological time and cosmological systems for the production of global modernity. She is also beginning work on a second project exploring the contemporary construction of the racial identity of Neanderthals against the long history of the disputed place of Neanderthals in the human evolutionary lineage since the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains in 1856 and the first complete skeletal analysis in 1908.

Kern earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Princeton University in 2018. Her dissertation won the 2019 DHST dissertation prize from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Before coming to Chicago, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Prof. Hevia has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.

University of Chicago, PhD '86

BIOGRAPHY

James Hevia's research has focused on empire and imperialism in eastern and central Asia. Primarily dealing with the British Empire in India and southeast Asia and the Qing empire in China, the specific concerns have been with the causes and justifications for conflict; how empire in Asia became normalized within Europe through markets, exhibitions, and various forms of public media; and how the events of the nineteenth century are remembered in contemporary China. Both Cherishing Men from Afar (1995) and English Lessons (2003) focus on these issues. Subsequent research has centered on how the British in India developed and became dependent upon the production of useful knowledge about populations, geography, and pack animals to maintain their Asian empire. The first part of this project deals with military intelligence and appears in The Imperial Security State (2012). The second part of the project addresses military logistics, the uses of pack animals in warfare, the emergence of tropical veterinary medicine, and the physical transformation of the Punjab as a resource for supporting a security regime in northwest India.  These subjects are taken up in Animal Labor & Colonial Warfare (2018). The third part of the project, now underway, considers the impact on India of new agricultural sciences that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. Imperial Pests will focus attention on applied or economic botany and entomology and demonstrate how “constructive colonialism” in India situated imperial development projects in a global scientific network. It will specifically address the war on insect and weed “pests” and the long-term ecological impact on post-colonial nations-states in South Asia.

University of Chicago, PhD '94

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Japan's "long" nineteenth century (1780s–1910s). I am interested in the social history of intellectual and cultural practices and the continuities and ruptures between what conventional periodization terms Japan's "early modern" and "modern" eras. My first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke, 2003) examined the nativist discourse of the late Tokugawa period. It traced the efforts of early nineteenth century intellectuals to define the nature of "Japan" as a locus of personal and cultural identity and the appropriation of aspects of this discourse by modern scholars who sought to define the contours of modern Japanese nationalism.

With the completion of this project I turned to a new set of questions related to the history of the body as it came to be conceptualized within medical and legal discourses. My second monograph, Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) explores the long history of leprosy in Japan from the late medieval period when it was identified as a "karmic retribution disease" to the modern period when attempts to control the disease prompted the creation of a system of public sanitaria. I argue that in the modern era leprosy, a particularly stigmatized disease, became the object of an intense debate on the place of the chronically ill and disabled within the Japanese nation.

Gender is an important category of analysis within my work and I have a long-standing interesting in issues of reproductive health and reproductive rights. Together with Barbara Brooks, I co-edited Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Hawaii, 2014). I authored the introduction and contributed an essay that examined the criminalization of abortion and infanticide in late nineteenth-century Japan.

I am currently working on two additional monographs. The first explores the intellectual and professional world of an early modern doctor who practiced in the villages in Akita in the 1830s and '40s. It seeks to explore the impact of new forms of knowledge, techniques, and materia medica for medical practice and considers the implications of the "medical revolution" of the early nineteenth century for the state-sponsored introduction of Western biomedicine after 1870. The second builds on my research on medical commodities, alternative therapies, and psychiatric practice and explores the impact of the new medical marketplace on ideas about mental health in Japan from c. 1880–1940.

In recent years, I have become interested in the use of digital tools for historical research, specifically ArcGIS and text mining. I utilized ArcGIS in my research on leprosy to explore the place of private leprosy hospitals and clinics in the cityscape of late nineteenth-century Tokyo. I am working on a digital project called "Mapping Medical Tokyo" that seeks to visualize and analyze the spatial dimensions of health, disease, and medical care in the Meiji-era city.

My work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the IIE Fulbright, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Courses

• Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations (undergraduate)

• Edo/Tokyo: Society and the City in Japan (undergrad/grad)

• Medicine and Culture in East Asia (undergrad/grad)

• Contact Zones: Treaty Ports in Nineteenth Century Japan (undergrad/grad)

• Gender and Japanese History (undergrad/grad)

University of Cambridge, PhD '92

BIOGRAPHY

Adrian Johns is the author of The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023), Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009), and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), and co-editor (with James Evans) of Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (Osiris 38, 2023, forthcoming). He has also authored dozens of papers in the histories of science, the book, media, and information. The Nature of the Book won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. Piracy won the Laing Prize and was selected as Book of the Year by the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Johns has been awarded Guggenheim, ACLS, and NEH fellowships. Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, he has also taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology.

Harvard University, PhD '09

BIOGRAPHY

My research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is my way of exploring how history and thought shape each other over time. The Italian Renaissance is a perfect moment for approaching this question because at that point the ideas about science, religion, and the world that had developed in the Middle Ages suddenly met those of the ancient world, reconstructed from rediscovered sources. All at once many beliefs, scientific systems, and perceived worlds clashed, mixed, and produced an unprecedented range of new ideas, which in turn shaped the following centuries and, thereby, our current world.

My current research focuses on patterns in the history of the real motives of censors over space and time, from antiquity to the digital age, especially the Inquisition and early modern censorship, and 20th century censorship of popular media. The enormous impact of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has led modern people to imagine censorship working the way his Ministry of Truth does: imposed top-down on a populace, with vast resources, a stable, long-term plan, and the goal of controlling society, stifling thought, and destroying information. But the real actions and records of past censors reveal that the vast majority of real censorship has inverse qualities: shaped by bottom-up social anxiety, constantly desperate for funds and personnel, hastily improvised in response to a perceived crisis, constantly transformed ad hoc as the perceived threat changes, and (from the point of view of the censors) aiming to protect vulnerable individuals, and to encourage self-censorship rather than destroying extant information. Only by examining the real motives which have made people say "Yes" to censorship over space and time can we understand what patterns help it flourish, and ways to combat it. I am especially interested in how innovations in information technology trigger waves of new censorship, a topic I explored in a dialog series and museum exhibit: voices.uchicago.edu/censorship.

As a novelist (science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction), I am also very interested in how to better connect the worlds of history research and speculative fiction, both to innovate pedagogically, and to help new improved historical narratives and correctives make it into the books, games, and TV which are what shape most people's first impressions of history, but often draw on histories that are more than half a century out of date.  I have a forthcoming collection of essays on history and genre fiction, Diaspora of Time: Conversations on Science Fiction and Fantasy coming from Tor Books, several publications on history in SF&F, comics, anime & manga, and am a nonfiction columnist for Strange Horizons.  I also employ creative writing, role-playing and LARP in my classes, and work with SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) on helping to connect writers with historians and their research.  I also have a forthcoming popular press book, Why Renaissance? Invention of a Golden Age, which aims to present to a general audience how and why the ideas of a golden Renaissance and bad Middle Ages were invented, and how historians are still working to improve and update them, and to update popular conceptions of Renaissance humanism.

My first scholarly book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, explores scholars' use of Lucretius's Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura from its rediscovery in 1417 to 1600, focusing on the challenges its atomistic physics posed to Christian patterns of thought. In a period when atheism was often considered a sign of madness, the sudden availability of a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena in nontheistic ways and that argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God threatened to supply the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. At the same time, humanist scholars who idealized ancient Rome were eager to study a poem whose language and structure so often anticipated their beloved Aeneid. My book uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy and shows how atomism and ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became situated in Europe's intellectual landscape at the beginning of the scientific transformations of the seventeenth century. In it I employ a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, whose results expose how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century, fostered by the growth of printing, controlled the circulation of texts and gradually expanded Europe's receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

I also work extensively on classical transformations, i.e., how, thanks to humanist enthusiasm for reconstructing the golden age of ancient Greece and Rome, material received from the classical and medieval worlds was transformed in Renaissance hands and in turn transformed the Renaissance world. I am working on a long-term project on the imagined antiquity believed in by Renaissance humanists, and how their efforts to reconstruct the ancient world aimed, not at the ancient world as we now understand it, but at a very different ancient world whose character can be reconstructed from Renaissance paratexts, imitations, paintings, period translations, biographies of ancients, forgeries, and spuria which we often dismiss today as simple errors. Along with the Classical Transformations Group at Texas A&M University and the Transformationen der Antike group at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, I am working to change the way we think about reception studies, and bring greater attention to how each period transforms and is transformed by the materials it inherits from earlier eras.

Much of my research has been conducted in rare books libraries, especially in Rome and Florence, where I worked with Renaissance copies of classical texts, both manuscripts and printed books. I have been a Fulbright scholar in Italy and a graduate reader and later a fellow at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. I completed my PhD and graduate teaching at Harvard University, and taught at Texas A&M University before coming to the University of Chicago. My article "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance" (Journal of the History of Ideas, 73:3, [July 2012]: 395–416) won the 2013 I Tatti Prize for Best Article by a Junior Scholar, and the prize for the best article in the JHI.

All my projects stem from my overall interest in the relationship between ideas and historical change. Our fundamental convictions about what is true evolve over time, so different human peoples have, from their own perspectives, lived in radically different worlds. The universe which Thomas Aquinas thought he occupied was not the universe in which Plato or Machiavelli or Freud believed they lived, and such beliefs in turn shaped the futures they tried to build out of what they inherited from the past. Our own current efforts to build the future are likewise predicated on what we believe is true, but what we believe is not what any past culture has believed, nor what any future cultures will believe.

St. Louis University, PhD' 71

University of Chicago, PhD' 78

BIOGRAPHY

I do research on history and philosophy of biology and psychology, as well as on German Romanticism. This includes particular interest in evolutionary biopsychology, ethology, and sociobiology. Concerning philosophic and metahistoric problems, I have argued for a revaluation of evolutionary ethics and have developed a natural selection model for historiographic analysis. My first book treats evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. That history discusses the period from the late eighteenth century to the present, but particularly focuses on the work of Charles Darwin. Other figures that receive major attention are Herbert Spencer, George Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, William James, James Mark Baldwin, Konrad Lorenz, and Edward O. Wilson. In another book, I have traced the gradual alteration in meaning of the concept of “evolution” from the seventeenth century up to Darwin and contemporary neo-Darwinians. I argue that Darwin's own theory has a radically different character than usually thought. In another vein, I have written a history of German Romanticism during the period 1770-1830. I argue that the German Romantics held that aesthetic approaches to nature and scientific approaches were complementary, and that this conception had a powerful impact on both the art and biological science of the period. Among the figures considered are Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Kant, Schelling, and Goethe. German evolutionary theory is the subject of my next book, with a special focus on Ernst Haeckel; he was supposed to have committed egregious fraud and produced theories that led to the rise of Nazi biology. I dispute both of these contentions. The connection between evolutionary theory and Hitler's biology is the subject of a book that examines controversies in the historiography of evolutionary biology. Recently, Michael Ruse and I have embarked on an historical and philosophical consideration of Darwin's accomplishment—we disagree profoundly. I teach courses on all of the above topics, as well as courses on the philosophy of history and ancient Greek philosophy and science.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD '11

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Rossi is an historian of medicine and science in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. His work focuses on the historical and cultural metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their corporeal selves and those of others. 

His first book manuscript traces the origins of color science—the physiology, psychology, and physics of color—in the late-nineteenth-century United States to a series of questions about what modern America ought to be: about the scope of medical, scientific, and political authority over the sensing body; about the nature of aesthetic, physiological, and cultural development between individual and civilization; about the relationship between aesthetic harmony, physiological balance, and social order.

His second project looks at how linguists, anatomists, and speech pathologists moved, over the course of the twentieth century, from viewing language as a function of sound-producing organs (tongue, lips, palate, larynx, etc.) to searching for a notional “language organ” within the brains of all human beings. Such interpretative shifts in understanding human anatomy are neither an ancient phenomenon nor one limited to extreme medical specialization, but rather are ongoing issues, providing a window on the social, political, and philosophical understanding of modern bodies, medicine, and science.

Prior to Chicago, Michael was a postdoctoral fellow in the Groupe Histoire des sciences de l’homme at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Cachan in France. He received a PhD in the history and anthropology of science, technology, and society from MIT and an AB from Columbia University.