New Books in Science, Technology, and...
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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2701
Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Sc...
The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel,
67 min
2702
Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” ...
What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction ...
63 min
2703
Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Compe...
In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional transformations of a group of thinkers and practitione...
67 min
2704
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food an...
By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
63 min
2705
Deborah R. Coen, “The Earthquake Observers: Dis...
Deborah R. Coen‘s new book chronicles how the earthquake emerged and receded as a scientific object through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Half of the chapters in The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of...
47 min
2706
Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Sc...
Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War.
49 min
2707
Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Huma...
Imagine the academic world as a beach. The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life.
71 min
2708
Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Clois...
In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science.
80 min
2709
Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYer...
An interview with Alec Foege
49 min
2710
Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Im...
“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.” From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and crises that have shaped the narratives of fringe science...
69 min
2711
Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance ...
You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramificati...
60 min
2712
Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visuali...
Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings,
66 min
2713
Signe Rousseau, “Food and Social Media: You Are...
The other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed to use them before they went bad, but how?
52 min
2714
Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings ...
Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA technology into a thriving business.
63 min
2715
Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical E...
Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical ima...
65 min
2716
David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: T...
In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of f...
64 min
2717
Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the ...
Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences...
64 min
2718
Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics:...
Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722).
68 min
2719
Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines...
From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the me...
76 min
2720
Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the...
Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work,
56 min
2721
Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining ...
Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method,
53 min
2722
Janet Kourany, “Philosophy of Science After Fem...
Do social values belong in the sciences? Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science.
66 min
2723
Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen H...
“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.” First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book.
64 min
2724
Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Progn...
This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism,
68 min
2725
Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating...
Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine...
63 min