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Osiris annually examines a particular topic in the history of science, bringing together experts in the field to consider multiple aspects of the time period, episode, or theme. Volume 22 explores the ways that twentieth-century political institutions and the human sciences in the western world attempted to understand and shape the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.

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Osiris, Volume 23

Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960

Edited by Michael Gordin, Karl Hall, and Alexei Kojevnikov

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The newest annual volume of Osiris, Intelligentsia Science explores the transformations in science in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, from serfdom to Sputnik, as a series of developments in Russian culture.
The contributors argue that it was the generation of the 1860s that transformed “intelligentsia” into a central notion of Russian popular discourse, cementing its association with revolutionary politics—and with science. Science became the cornerstone of the intelligentsia’s ideological and political projects, either as an alternative to socialism, or more often as its nominal raison d’être. The Russian century may in fact be over, but the interrelation of the intelligentsia and science to form “intelligentsia science” proves enduring.

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Osiris, Volume 24

National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology

Edited by Carol E. Harrison and Ann Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2009

This latest volume of Osiris, National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology, explores the ways in which modern science and the nation-state have mutually interacted since the Enlightenment. The contributors argue for the formative role of science and technology in the creation of national identity, and with examples drawn from eastern and western nation-states, they argue that possession of scientific and technological resources became a marker of national character; the first states to develop this power nexus of science, technology, and bureaucracy went on to become globally dominant and widely imitated. This volume traces the significance of this relationship from its beginnings in the West to its dissemination into the postcolonial world.

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Osiris, Volume 25

Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State

Edited by Eric H. Ash

University of Chicago Press, 2010

This newest annual edition of Osiris brings together a variety of scholars to consider a topic of increasing interest in the history of science: expertise. Focusing specifically on the role expertise has played in the support, legitimation, and growth of the state since early modern times, Expertise and the Early Modern State reveals how scientific expertise and practical knowledge were crucial to the construction of early modern empires and economies. The state, on the other hand, performed a similar function for scientists, giving them much of the status and resources they needed to further their work. A penetrating, multifaceted investigation, Osiris 25 will be required reading for historians of science and early modern political development.

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Osiris, Volume 26

Klima

Edited by James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic

University of Chicago Press, 2011

“Climate is a rather elusive entity,” wrote Helmut Landsberg in 1950 as he sorted out some twenty or so competing definitions. This volume of Osiris explores the complexities in understanding what climate means from a historical perspective. The title of this volume, Klima, evokes its Greek origins, κλίμα, meaning an extended period encompassing vast layers of different kinds of meteorological information. The volume thus seeks not only to decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences, but also to re-visit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other “endemic” concerns. If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? The essays in this volume treat climate discourse as a framing device that makes explicit all social concerns arising from the anxiety over the sensible and latent experiences of living in an atmosphere of hunger and satiation, disease and health, poverty and wealth, isolation and community, angst and hope.

James Fleming is a historian of science and technology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, Maine. Vladimir Jankovic is a faculty member, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is a historian of atmospheric sciences, and has published in the history of meteorology, geography of environmental knowledge, and medical climatology.

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Osiris, Volume 28

Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750-1980

Edited by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell, and Myles W. Jackson

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2013

The understanding of sound underwent profound changes with the advent of laboratory science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New techniques of sound visualization and detection, the use of electricity to generate sound, and the emergence of computers radically reshaped the science of acoustics and the practice of music. The essays in this volume of Osiris explore the manifold transformations of sound ranging from soundproof rooms to psychoacoustics of seismology to galvanic music to pedaling technique. They also discuss more general themes such as the nature of scientific evidence and the development of instruments and instrumentation. In examining the reciprocity between music and science, this volume reaches a new register in the evolution of scientific methodology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Osiris, Volume 29

Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Edited by Matthew D. Eddy, Seymour H. Mauskopf, and William R. Newman

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2014

The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry. The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner of “chymistry.” In a similar vein, the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its focus on phlogiston and airs, has been expanded to include artisanal, medical, and industrial practices. This collection of essays builds on these reappraisals and excavates the affinities between alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It reveals a rich world of theory and practice in which instruments, institutions, inscriptions and ideas were used to make material knowledge. More generally, the volume will catalyze wide-ranging discussions of material and visual cultures, the role of expertise, and the religious and practical contexts of scientific inquiry.

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Osiris, Volume 30

Scientific Masculinities

Edited by Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2015

This volume of Osiris integrates gender analysis with the global history of science and medicine from the late Middle Ages to the present by focusing on masculinity. The premise is that social constructions of masculinity function simultaneously as foils for femininity and as methods of differentiating between “kinds” of men. In exploring scientific masculinities, the book asks: how has masculinity been defined, and what are the mechanisms by which it operates in science? The essays are divided into sections that emphasize the importance of gender to the practices of professionalization, the spaces in which scientific, technological, and medical labor is performed, and the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation are measured and serve as metaphors in society and culture.

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Osiris, Volume 31

History of Science and the Emotions

Edited by Otniel E. Dror, Bettina Hitzer, Anja Laukötter, and Pilar León-Sanz

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

What new insights become available for historians when emotions are included as an analytical category? This volume of Osiris explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dialogue between the history of emotions and the history of science leads to a rethinking of our categories of analysis, our subjects, and our periodizations. The ten case studies in the volume explore these possibilities and interrelationships across North America and Europe, between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, in a variety of scientific disciplines. They analyze how scientific communities approached and explained the functions of emotions; how the concomitant positioning of emotions in or between body-mind-intersubjectivity took place; how emotions infused practices and how practices generated emotions; and, ultimately, how new and emerging identities of and criteria for emotions created new knowledge, new technologies, and new subjectivities.

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Osiris, Volume 32

Data Histories

Edited by Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women’s history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume. But the history of data is more than just the sum of its parts. It provides an emerging new rubric for considering the impact of changes in cultures of information in the sciences in the longue durée, and an opportunity for historians to rethink important questions that cross many of our traditional disciplinary categories.

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Osiris, Volume 33

Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories

Edited by Lukas Rieppel, William Deringer, and Eugenia Lean

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

The historical relationship between science and capitalism has long stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge of scholarly interest in the “history of capitalism,” as well as from renewed attention to political economy by historians of science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.

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Osiris, Volume 34

Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science

Edited by Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. This volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytelling—science fiction (SF), told through a variety of media—and the history of science.

The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both SF and the history of science are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach, Presenting Futures Past examines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places. The essays consider the role played by SF in the history of specific scientific disciplines, topics, or cultures, as well as the ways in which it has helped to move scientific concepts, methodologies, and practices between wider cultural areas. Ultimately, Presenting Futures Past explores what SF can tell us about the histories of the future, how different communities have envisaged their futures, and how SF conveys the socioscientific claims of past presents.

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Osiris, Volume 35

Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences

Edited by E. C. Spary and Anya Zilberstein

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

Since the early modern period, science has played an ever-growing role in healthcare, agriculture, the regulation of food and drink trades, and the standardization of nutrition guidelines. Yet until now, few studies had explored the historical processes through which scientific claims of knowledge gained the power to shape food supply chains and consumer choices. This volume of Osiris reveals how sciences of food have been informed by, and helped to shape in turn, an array of institutions, labor regimes, cultural practices, and ethical commitments.

The essays delve into a range of topics, from early modern dietetics and debates about cannibalism to modern ready-to-eat rations and Ayurvedic recipes, from analyses of hungry model organisms to the dining rituals of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their patrons. As Food Matters shows, the history of knowledge about food has always raised debates about the shifting definition and boundaries of expertise: between traditional recipes and experimental protocols; between domestic craft skill and laboratory procedure; between the management and redistribution of resources for the social body on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of individual bodies on the other. At a moment when the authority of science is being questioned by a variety of publics, Food Matters is a timely reminder that such tensions, always present in food-related domains, reflect broader historical developments through which science became a prevalent force in shaping all aspects of public and private life.

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Osiris, Volume 36

Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law

Edited by Helen Tilley

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This volume of Osiris takes as its point of departure a simple premise: we have yet to fully flesh out the complex historical interplay between medicine and law across the globe. Therapeutic Properties takes an inventive look at the issue, presenting welcome insights on the worldwide ascendancy of biomedicine, the persistence of nonofficial and unorthodox approaches to healing, and the legal contexts that have served to shape these dynamics.

The contributions draw upon source material from the Americas, Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia to trace the influence of penal and civil codes, courts and constitutions, and patents and intellectual properties on not only health practices but also the very foundations of state-sanctioned medicine. The authors explore, too, how institutions of global governance, including those underpinning empires and trade, have historically created feedback loops that enabled laws and regulatory regimes to spread, amplifying their effects and standardizing approaches to diseases, drugs, professions, personhood, and well-being along the way. Highlighting the payoff of interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, this volume adroitly teases apart how different actors fought to write the rules of global health, rendering certain approaches to life and death irrelevant and invisible, others pathological and punishable by law, and others still, normal and natural.

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Osiris, Volume 37

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds

Edited by Tara Alberts, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period.

This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

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Osiris, Volume 38

Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present

Edited by James Evans and Adrian Johns

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era.

How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation.

The volume contains essays by experts in fields extending from early modern arithmetic to contemporary robotics. Traversing a range of cases and arguments that connect politics, historical epistemology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence, the contributors collectively propose a novel vocabulary of concepts with which to think about how the history of science can contribute to understanding today’s world. Ultimately, Beyond Craft and Code reconfigures the historiography of science and technology to suggest a new way to approach the questions posed by an algorithmic culture—not only improving our understanding of algorithmic pasts and futures but also unlocking our ability to better govern our present.

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Osiris, Volume 39

Disability and the History of Science

Edited by Jaipreet Virdi, Mara Mills, and Sarah F. Rose

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies.

Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge.

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai.

Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

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Osiris, Volume 40

Animal Mobilities

Edited by Tamar Novick, Lisa Onaga, and Gabriel N. Rosenberg

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025

Situates "animal mobility" within the politics of movement, opening new perspectives in the history of science.

Human societies often come to know the natural world by examining animals, even as animals, frequently both willful and animate, can elude human grasp and challenge human aims. Animals and their movements have underpinned many methodological, moral, and epistemic dilemmas that generatively trouble the field. Featuring a range of geographies, species, languages, and cultures, the contributions in this volume broaden the view of the historical roles animals play in knowledge production processes. Organized according to three scales of animal movement (individuals, groups, systems), the twelve richly illustrated inquiries are situated in different time periods, from the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire to the recent globalized past, and introduce varied forms, capacities, and politics of movement associated with animals. The analytic attention to animal mobility deepens comprehension of animal agency and human–animal interactions in unexpected spaces, including airports, entertainment venues, living rooms, dirt roads, and waterways. Taken together, the case studies in this volume reconsider how, where, and by whom science is done.

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Osiris, Volume 41

Histories of Science and Childhoods

Edited by Andrea Graus, Violeta Ruiz, and Elisabeth M. Yang

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2026

Converges the fields of childhood studies and the histories of science, medicine, and technology, foregrounding and investigating the entangled histories of the "child" and childhood and science.

Building on the premise that neither childhood nor science are natural, essential, or universalizable entities, this Osiris volume examines the interrelation of these two categories, tracing back to the Middle Ages and up until the present. Organized around three major themes—theorizing and historicizing the category of childhood and child agency, the technologies and politics of child health, and the co-constitutive relationship between the concept of the child and childhood and the realm of science—the issue traverses time, space, cultures, bodies, and disciplines. The contributions explore the role that science, technology, and medicine played in constructing how the ideology of childhood shaped ideas about scientific thinking and practices, e.g., the psy-sciences, sexology, filmology, medicine, health technology; and how the entanglement between the “child” and science influenced the formation of national identity, selfhood, colonial rule, resistance, and the notions of “progress” and the “future.” Using the “child” as an analytical category and considering children as fully-fledged historical actors allows us to retell and re-present (the history of) science through a wide range of sources, and in turn, reimagine our understandings of agency, governance, subjectivity, human nature, and what science owes the “child” and children.

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