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The Pasteur Institute of Iran underwent a major expansion of its research productivity and international recognition during some of the most significant events of modern Iranian history: th...

In 1794 the exiled chemist Joseph Priestley found asylum in the United States, where science was seen as both an international endeavor that depended upon human rights and a tool that would...

Around 1900, hay fever was a contested illness, mostly unknown among physicians or believed to be neurotic in nature. Motivated by a desire to gather and disseminate knowledge about their e...

Taking tuber sciences and their histories as a case study, this essay hinges on materiality, both as a condition shaping thing–human relations and as a vector for producing knowledge and ge...

This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philoso...

It is well known that the Ministry of State Security in the former German Democratic Republic was deeply involved in wiretapping and eavesdropping on both foreigners and its citizens. It is less widely known that, against this background, the Stasi developed a keen interest in technologies and techniques of speaker identification, such as the visualization of recorded sound and aural analysis. How exactly did Stasi employees analyze the sound of voices? How did listening become a legitimate way of knowing in this context? And why did speaker identification not become as powerful as the Stasi had hoped? Empirically, this essay draws on documents from the Stasi’s former archives. Theoretically, it builds on “sonic skills” in the sciences to clarify the identification practices and distinguishes between the “logic of forensics” and the “logic of surveillance” to understand why the Stasi ran ashore in its sound analysis endeavor. Finally, it aims to contribute to understanding the information paradox in the Stasi historiography and its implications for the history of science.

This essay provides solutions to the puzzles surrounding the meaning and development of Isaac Newton’s famous “Rules of Philosophizing.” It charts afresh the shift from the “Hypotheses” of ...

The starting point of this essay is a short film of an optical effect, published in 1998 by the Institute for Scientific Film (Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]) as part of a s...

The compilation film is the best-known example of recycling in cinema history. The uses to which this mode has been put in the domain of the science film, however, have received scant atten...

This essay investigates time-lapse cinematography as a hybrid, intermedial practice. To interrogate practices of authorship, publication, copying, storage, and especially distribution, it recovers the history of The Embryonic Development of Drosophila mela-nogaster, a film made by Eric Lucey at the University of Edinburgh in 1956. An unusually rich archive makes it possible to recover uses and reuses of time-lapse footage in research, teaching, and other forms of communication.

This essay discusses practices of reuse, archiving, and digitization of historical film documents from the Nazi era. It lays out the ways in which those filmic images can contribute to ques...

This essay reconstructs the origins of the film Bird-Song Contest with Chaffinches in the Western Harz Mountains (1991), a contribution to the eight-part series “Lower Saxonian Folklore Fil...

In 1939 and 1940 the Reich Office for Teaching Films (Reichsstelle fur den Unterrichtsfilm [RfdU]), the film organization of the National Socialist German government, published three educat...

The maternal deprivation hypothesis was arguably the most discussed debate in midcentury psychiatry. Combined with the gender ideology prevalent in America and Britain, it solidified the id...