New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture / Archimedes Bd.40 (PDF)

Denise Phillips is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches history of science and early modern European history. She received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2004, and in recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the Fulbright Commission and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Her first book, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850, was published in 2012 with the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on a study of the agricultural sciences in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, with an emphasis on how the expansion of market-driven forms of agriculture shaped the goals and parameters of agricultural science. As part of this broader project, she is also interested in how learned traditions of natural history and natural philosophy interacted with discourses about agriculture, and in the ways that epistemic authority was secured within these fields.Sharon Kingsland is professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1981, and since then has conducted research on many aspects of the history of modern life sciences. One focus of her research has been the history of ecological science, which is the subject of two books. Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (University of Chicago Press, 1985, 2nd edition 1995) explores the impact of mathematical modeling techniques in population ecology, in both academic and applied contexts, from the 1920s to the 1980s. The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), examines the reasons for the rapid emergence of ecology as a discipline in the United States and the subsequent development of ecology through the 20th century, culminating in the emergence of urban ecology as a new frontier in the 21st century. Exploring the history of ecology

“The collection of essays edited by Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland is a much welcomed addition to the historiography of agriculture and life sciences. The twenty-two essays in the volume cover a remarkable temporal and spatial ground. … Anyone interested in the history of agriculture and life sciences will find the essays in this collection a rewarding reading. The best hope is that today’s readers may become in turn contributors to the intellectual agenda set out by the book.” (Giuditta Parolini, HPLS, Vol. 38, 2016)