HSS Highlights, Pt. 2 December 7, 2008

Continuing part 1 of my recap of the good stuff I took away from this year’s HSS meeting in Pittsburgh….

There was a good session dedicated to “Science and Spectacle in the 18th Century” with papers by Mi Gyung Kim and Michael Lynn on ballooning, and Simon Werrett on the links between thinking on fireworks and electrical performance and philosophy.  There was also very good commentary by Jan Golinski, who pointed to Simon Schaffer’s paper, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” as the key work initiating this line of scholarship.  Werrett’s paper, in particular, was right out of Schaffer’s playbook (he even sounds a lot like him).  It’s interesting to see the issue of natural philosophical spectacle gain a finer texture, although it’s a little weird that we’re still puzzling out the taxonomy of practices of spectacle and philosophical demonstration a quarter of a century after the fact.  In any case, I enjoyed the fact that my blog-related reading paid off for me, and am hoping (more…)