Contributors
- Contributors
Jim Bennett is Keeper of the Museum of the History of Science in the University of Oxford. His research interests are in the histories of practical mathematics and of astronomy, as well as in the general history of scientific instruments. Recent publications linked to exhibitions held in Oxford have been co-authored with Stephen Johnston, The Geometry of War, 1500- 1750, and with Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple.
Mario Biagioli is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, and the author of Galileo, Courtier (Chicago, 1993). With support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is working on a book concerning the author-function in contemporary science. His most recent publication is “The Instability of Authorship,” The FASEB Journal (1998).
Lorraine Daston is Director of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in Berlin. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1988) and, with Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Press, 1998). Her current project is a history of the ideals and practices of scientific objectivity.
Peter Dear teaches in the Departments of Science and Technology Studies and of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995), and editor of The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings from Isis (Chicago, 1997).
Dennis Desroches is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, on science and rhetoric in the seventeenth century, at McMaster University.
Paula Findlen teaches Renaissance history and history of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and A Fragmentary Past: Museums and the Renaissance (forthcoming). The essay in this issue is part of a larger project on the seriocomic origins of modern science.
Steven J. Harris has taught the history of early modern science at Harvard University, Brandeis University, and Wellesley College. His research interests include the application of actor-network theory and the sociology of organizations to the Society of Jesus as a way of understanding the production of scientific knowledge within the order in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Related interests concern the history of cartography as a paradigm of long-distance knowledge production and as the most likely site for identifying conditions necessary for making graphical representations cumulative.
Mary Terrall is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. In the fall of 1998 she will move to UCLA as Assistant Professor in the Department of History. She is the author of several articles on science in the Enlightenment, and she is in the process of writing a biographical study of Maupertuis. She was awarded the Derek Price Award from the History of Science Society in 1994 for her article, “Representing the Earth’s Shape: The Polemics Surrounding Maupertuis’s Expedition to Lapland.”
