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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

Natural History in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1848

How the working practices of naturalists adapted to the political agendas of imperial expansion, nation state formation, and revolutionary movements.

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In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly and Popular Practice

Examining the role of diagrams in the history of genealogy, systematics and anthropology.

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The Many Births of the Test-Tube Baby

Reconstructing the web of communication.

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Culture at the Macro-Scale: Boundaries, Barriers and Endogenous Change

Investigating the processes and patterns of human cultures at and above the group level.

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Making Climate History

Mapping the links between how imperial and global energy infrastructures have re-made climate and how scientists have known climate.

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Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power

The promises and problematics of AI and machine learning seen from an historical perspective.

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From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security

Understanding how and by whom modern agricultural crops, and modern diets, have been made.

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How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums

A collaborative project that explores not how collections begin, but how and why they end.

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Tools in Materials Research

Examining the historical foundations of the tools that were used to understand – and manufacture – our material world.

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Epsilon: A Collaborative Digital Framework for Nineteenth-Century Letters of Science

Recreating the network of practitioners who expanded scientific knowledge in the long nineteenth century.

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Contingency in the History and Philosophy of Science

How contingent historical cases can be used in support of normative philosophical claims.

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Industrial Patronage and the Cold War University

Reevaluating the motives that drove industrial investment in university research after World War II.

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FlyBase: Communicating Drosophila Genetics on Paper and Online, 1970–2000

How scientific communities come together to produce community resources.

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The Lost Museums of Cambridge Science, 1865–1936

Examining the practices of collecting, display and demonstration in the sciences on the University's New Museums Site.

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Medical Publishers, Obscenity Law and the Business of Sexual Knowledge in Victorian Britain

Examining sexual health publishing and the law in the nineteenth century.

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Kinds of Intelligence

Exploring the nature of intelligence through the study of machines, humans and other animals.

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Varieties of Social Knowledge

Pulling together recent trends in social sciences to revisit classic epistemological questions.

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The Vesalius Census

Documenting every known surviving copy of two editions of the Fabrica, the first major illustrated atlas of anatomy.

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Histories of Biodiversity and Agriculture

Pursuing the history of efforts to protect the genetic diversity of maize, and investigating the history of seed banking as a global conservation practice and human health imperative.

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Investigating Fake Scientific Instruments in the Whipple Museum Collection

Using both traditional techniques of curatorial analysis and metallographic analysis to continue the Whipple Museum's pioneering research into fake scientific instruments.

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Before HIV: Homosex and Venereal Disease, c.1939–1984

How gay men, other men who had sex with men, and trans people increasingly became the focus of public-health efforts to control sexually transmitted infections.

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The Casebooks Project

Creating a digital edition of Simon Forman's and Richard Napier's medical records – unparalleled resources in the history of early modern medicine.

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Generation to Reproduction

Exploring topics in the history of generation and investigating how the modern world of reproduction was made.

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The Darwin Correspondence Project

Locating, researching and publishing the thousands of letters written by and to Charles Darwin.

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