Masterclass with Professor Lorraine Daston

(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)

Observation: A History of the Sciences, the Senses, and the Self, 500-1800 C.E.

Wednesday 13th September 2017
12:00pm Lunch provided
13:00pm Masterclass
Meeting Room (Room 471), Level 4, Global Change Institute (Building 20)

For HaSS HDR students. Strictly limited to 20 places. Registrations have now closed.


HaSS PhD and MPhil students are invited to participate in an IASH Masterclass with Professor Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute) on the topic of Observation: A History of the Sciences, the Senses, and the Self, 500-1800 C.E.

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Yet scientific observation lacks its own history -- it seems too ubiquitous, too basic, and too obvious to merit one. This Masterclass is devoted to the first attempts to write such a history from the early Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. It is a history of how the senses have been schooled and extended, how practices for recording and displaying data were developed and refined, and how private experiences of individuals became collective. Throughout its long history, observation has always been a form of knowledge that straddled the boundary between art and science, human and natural sciences, elite and popular culture. It has also been a way of life, a way of shaping the self of the observer.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include (co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), and (with Paul Erikson et al.) and How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014) as well as essays on the history of scientific facts, objectivity, curiosity, probability, attention, and the moral authority of nature which have appeared in various journals and collections. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Corresponding Member of the British Academy, and Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

Readings: Histories of Scientific Observation, edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011):
•    Katherine Park, “Observation in the Margins, 500-1500”
•    Gianna Pomata, “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, 1500-1650”
•    Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800”
 

Presented by the Intellectual and Literary History stream of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Venue

Meeting Room (Room 471), Level 4, Global Change Institute (Building 20)