Dr Pamela Mackenzie

Dr Pamela Mackenzie is a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Researcher and visiting scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science Department, working under the supervision of Dr Dániel Margócsy. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the department of Art History & Theory. She has held positions as a doctoral researcher in the research groups Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions, based at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute in Rome, and in Berlin at the 4a_Lab, a satellite research group of the Kunsthistorisches Intitute in Florenz. Mackenzie has additionally held a Lisa Jardine Fellowship at the Royal Society and a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library. Her research has also been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Mitacs Globalink, and the Robert and Moira Sansom Ideas Foundation, among others.

Research interests

Dr Mackenzie works at the crossover between art history and the history of science and medicine. Her current research project contends with the surprising number of images that were produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that depicted bladder stones after they were extracted from human bodies, dead or alive. She is investigating the important ways in which a visual culture developed around this painful and once very deadly condition in conjunction with a large-scale mobilization of resources and researchers in pursuit of discovering safer surgical interventions – or, even better, a cure. This project will explore the role of images in forming new collective understandings of the inner workings of the human body in the pursuit of novel cures across scientific and medical communities in Europe. She is also working on a book manuscript entitled The Microscope and the Map: Representation, Knowledge, and Possession in the Seventeenth Century. Based on her dissertation, this book will consider the overlapping visual and textual tropes between the mapping of the microscopic world and the creation of territorial maps in the context of colonial expansion in the late seventeenth century.