Apr 21
I hesitate at gurning maw of the industrial paper compacter, suffering an existential crisis. I’m at the council tip, clearing out my children’s school exercise books. There’s too many of them and they are cluttering up the house. I’m at the other end of the historian’s telescope; I’m making decisions about archiving—or not. And it’s …
Sep 27
Here are this term’s Wunderkammer sessions. We’ll be discussing the History Manifesto, SciArt, early-modern globalisation, transhumanism and the history of peer review. We meet every other Tuesday, from 17.30-19.00, in the Unicorn pub, Canterbury. Full details on the pdf wunderkammer_autumn_2016
Apr 12
Recent KentCHOTS graduate Dr Alice White (@HistorianAlice) gives her advice on how to give an academic talk in this short, downloadable leaflet.
Jan 25
The Centre for the History of the Sciences is pleased to be hosting the 10th annual Science in Public conference this summer. It will be held on 13-15 July 2016 on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus. We are welcoming proposals for papers and sessions from scholars and practitioners in all fields interested in researching …
Oct 27
I heard more spontaneous conversations today about science than I have ever heard in any exhibition anywhere. ‘Why are those rings rolling uphill?’ ‘Why is that water burning?’ ‘What will happen when the balloon fills?’ I was not at a science exhibition, but at the Turner Contemporary Gallery’s new show, Risk. The piece I was …
Apr 09
[William Whewell] ‘On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville’. Quarterly Review vol. LI, no. CI, March 1834, pp. 54-68. This is the full text of the article in which Whewell discusses the BAAS coinage of ‘scientist’, scanned in from the original. It includes the alternative (presumably not very serious) suggestion of ‘nature-poker’ …
Feb 06
When I’m talking to a new group of students, I frequently find myself fumbling for the word that will briefly capture the realm of scholarship on which I draw: a sort of super-league that includes Beer, Collins, Daston, Latour, MacKenzie, Haraway, Schaffer, Shapin. I find myself calling on flabby phrases like ‘historians and anthropologists and …
Feb 04
Join us for a cold, dark evening treat, which takes the audience back to the time of the magic lanternist for an evening of visual spectacle and darkly chilling horrors. Featuring Jeremy Brooker and his Grand Gothic Magic Lantern Show, the event will include werewolf transformations, ghostly apparitions, the Dance of Death and the Man …
Oct 31
This blog post is one of an on-going series arising from the AHRC-funded project Metamorphoses: Gaming Art and Science with Ovid. The project pairs up an artist (Sarah Craske, research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Sciences, University of Kent) and a scientist (Simon Park, Department of Microbial and Cellular Sciences, University …
Jul 15
Or the uses of witchcraft in warfare — But that, without the sanction of hypocrisy, superintendence by hypocrisy, the blessing by hypocrisy, nothing ever does come about — Or military demonstrations of the overwhelming effects of trained hates — scientific uses of destructive bolts of a million hate-power — the blasting of enemies by disciplined …
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