Academic Program Affiliation(s): Environmental and Urban Studies, French Studies, Historical Studies, Medieval Studies, Science, Technology, and Society
Academic Expertise: Historical Studies
Area of Specialization: Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Research Interests: History and philosophy of science; radical Utopian thought; Spinoza and Spinozism; science and dissent; botany, chemistry, French Academy of Sciences
Teaching Interests: Middle Ages; scientific revolution; disease in history; France to the Revolution; Dutch Republic
Other Interests: Organic gardening, native plants; classical music; art, especially 16th and 17th centuries; animal ethology
Highlights:
2008-08-06 — Publication
Books: A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences. Berkeley: U California Press, 1990.
Royal Funding of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences during the 1690s. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 77:4, Philadelphia, 1987.
Selected Articles: "Censure ou querelles scientifiques : l'affaire Duclos (1675-1685)," in Règlement, usages et science dans la France de l'absolutisme, ed. Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère and Éric Brian (Paris: Lavoisier Tec et Doc, 2003).
"Nicolas Hartsoeker, savant hollandais associé de l'Académie des Sciences et espion de Louis XIV," in De la diffusion des sciences à l'espionnage industriel xve-xxe siècle, ed. André Guillerme (Fontenay Saint-Cloud: ENS Editions, 1999).
"French Utopian Thought:The Culture of Criticism," "Massé's Haircut," and "Foigny's Joke," in EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 4 and 5 (Utopia), ed. David Lee Rubin, co-ed. Alice Stroup (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1998, 1999).
"Louis XIV as Patron of the Parisian Academy of Sciences," in Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV, ed. David Lee Rubin, (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992).
