American Philosophical Society
Member History

Results:  14 ItemsModify Search | New Search
Page: 1Reset Page
Residency
International (3)
Resident (10)
Class
4. Humanities (14)
Subdivision
404c[X]
1Name:  Dr. Janet Browne
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2010
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1950
   
 
Janet Browne’s interests range widely over the history of the life sciences and natural history. After a first degree in zoology she studied for a PhD in the history of science at Imperial College London, published as The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (1983). Ever since then she has specialized in Charles Darwin’s work, first as associate editor of the early volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, and more recently as author of a biographical study that integrated Darwin’s science with his life and times. The biography was awarded several prizes, including the James Tait Black award for non-fiction, the WH.Heinemann Prize from the Royal Literary Society, and the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. From 2006 to 2023 she was a member of the History of Science Department at Harvard University. She was previously based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. She retired in 2023 and now lives in the UK.
 
2Name:  Dr. Jed Z. Buchwald
 Institution:  California Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  2011
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1949
   
 
Jed Z. Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the Californnia Institute of Technology. He is married to Diana Kormos Buchwald, who is also a professor at Caltech, where she is Director and General Editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Awarded a five-year MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, Buchwald was trained at Princeton (BA ’71) and Harvard (Ph.D ’74.) From 1974 to 1992 he taught at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and. From 1992 to 2001 he was at MIT as Dibner Professor of the History of Science, where he also directed the Dibner Institute. Buchwald has authored or co-authored five books and seven edited volumes on the history of science and related matters. His most recent two are The Zodiac of Paris, with Diane Greco Josefowicz and (recently completed) Reckoning with the Past: Isaac Newton, Ancient Chronicles and the Temper of Evidence, with Mordechai Feingold. His editorial activities include: co-editor with Jeremy Gray, Archive for History of Exact Sciences; editor, Archimedes New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (Kluwer-Springer); managing editor, Studies and Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (Springer); editor, Transformations Studies in the History of Science and Technology (MIT); he serves on the advisory board of several other journals. At Caltech Buchwald teaches courses in ancient civilization, religion and in the history of physics.
 
3Name:  Dr. Karine Chemla
 Institution:  CNRS, Université Paris 7
 Year Elected:  2019
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1957
   
 
Karine Chemla studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles (1976-1982). In 1979, the Director, Josiane Serre, nominated her for a scholarship awarded by the Singer Polignac Foundation for students to spend a year overseas working in an area distinct from their primary research area. For her project, entitled “Science and Culture,” she selected China. In September 1980, she started a self-directed programme of Chinese language, and, in 1981, the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (Chinese Academy of science, Beijing) established a curriculum for her. She was the first foreign student to study the History of Science in China at the Institute. In 1982, she obtained a PhD degree with a thesis devoted to a 13th century Chinese text, and was hired in the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where she is now Senior Researcher of exceptional class, affiliated to the research group SPHERE (Université de Paris). Chemla contributes to fundamental research, by producing research tools. With Guo Shuchun, she has published a critical edition and a French translation of the main Chinese mathematical canonical text: The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures and its two key ancient commentaries. For this, Chemla also composed the first glossary ever published of Chinese technical terms used in ancient mathematics. K. Chemla & Guo Shuchun, Les Neuf chapitres, with a glossary by K. Chemla, was awarded the Prize Hirayama, 2006, Academy of Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres. Chemla also contributes theoretical work to the history of science, on topics related to the historiography of mathematics in the ancient world, scientific cultures and epistemological values. Her publications include: The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions (ed., 2012); Texts, Textual acts and the History of Science (ed., with Jacques Virbel, 2015); The Oxford Handbook of Generality in Mathematics and the Sciences (ed., with Renaud Chorlay and David Rabouin, 2016); Cultures without culturalism (ed., with Evelyn Fox Keller, 2017). Chemla is past president of the European Society for the History of Science (2014-2016) and was awarded an Advanced Research grant of the European Research Council (2011-2016). Chemla was elected Member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (2005-) and of the Academia Europaea (2013-). In 2008 she was awarded the Silver medal from CNRS.
 
4Name:  Dr. Angela N. H. Creager
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2020
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1963
   
 
Angela Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. She graduated from Rice University with a double major in biochemistry and English and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry in the laboratory of Howard K. Schachman at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed an interest in the history of biology. Supported by postdoctoral awards, she retrained as a historian of science at Harvard University and MIT, then joined the History faculty at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of biomedical research, from virology, as featured in The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965, to the history of environmental health and regulation. In 2018, her book Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine was awarded the Patrick Supper Prize in the History of Science by the American Philosophical Society. She also received an NSF CAREER Award in 1999 and the Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society in 2009. She served as President of the History of Science Society in 2014-2015. From 2016 to 2020 she was Director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, where she oversaw residential fellowships and seminars and on the themes of "Risk and Fortune" and "Law and Legalities." She becomes chair of Princeton’s History Department on July 1, 2020. Angela Creager was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020.
 
5Name:  Dr. Lorraine Daston
 Institution:  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1951
   
 
Lorraine Daston studied at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and was awarded her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 1979. She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, Göttingen, and Chicago and since 1995 has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is also a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, and the moral authority of nature. The theme that unites all of her work is the history of rationality, both its ideals and practices. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and Corresponding Member of the British Academy. Among the awards that have recognized her work are the Pfizer Medal for best book in the history of science published in English, the Schelling Medal of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, and the Bielefeld Science Prize.
 
6Name:  Professor Paolo Galluzzi
 Institution:  Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza, Florence; University of Florence
 Year Elected:  2002
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
Paolo Galluzzi is a prominent figure in the scientific and cultural life of Italy and a well known collaborator on international projects. He is a teacher-scholar, the author of several books on the science and technology of the Renaissance and other aspects of the history of science in Italy and the creator of widely acclaimed exhibitions that unite period machines with beautifully reconstructed working models. He is a master at designing and using information technology for instruction and research; a member of several commissions to conserve Italy's cultural heritage; and a tireless innovator of ways to interest high-school students and their parents in the history and culture of science and technology. Paolo Galluzzi has directed the Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza, Florence since 1982 and has been Professor of the History of Science at the University of Florence since 1994.
 
7Name:  Dr. John L. Heilbron
 Institution:  Worcester College, Oxford & University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  1990
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1934
   
 
John Heilbron spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his academic degrees. He was Professor of History and Director, Office for the History of Science and Technology, 1973-1994, and the University's Vice Chancellor, 1990-1994. Since his retirement, Dr. Heilbron has acted as visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology and Yale University, while continuing as editor of Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. He is an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and the recipient of several honorary degrees. Among his awards is the 2006 Pais Prize for History of Physics, presented jointly by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. Dr. Heilbron's books include Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1979, reprinted in 1999); Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman of German Science (1986, reprinted in 2000); Geometry Civilized (1998); The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999); as general editor, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (2003); Galileo (2010); The History of Physics, a Very Short Introduction (2018); Niels Bohr, a Very Short Introduction (2019); The Ghost of Galileo in a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (2021); and The Incomparable Monsignor, Francesco Bianchini's World of Science, History, and Court Intrigue (2022). John Heilbron was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1990.
 
8Name:  Dr. Hermann Hunger
 Institution:  University of Vienna
 Year Elected:  1995
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
Hermann Hunger is a historian of astronomy who is also a first-rate Assyriologist. His editions of cuneiform texts cover the entire range of the corpus and culminate in the publication of his Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia series. This work stands as one of the most important publications of original sources for the study of Babylonian astronomy and became widely known through Dr. Hunger's communication of the earliest known record of Halley's Comet. Born in Germany, Dr. Hunger earned his Ph.D. from the University of Munster in 1966. He served as associate professor at the University of Chicago prior to joining the faculty at the University of Vienna in 1978. He currently holds the position of Professor of Assyriology at the Institut für Orientalistik and chairs the Commission for the History of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Medicine at the University of Vienna.
 
9Name:  Dr. Alexander Jones
 Institution:  Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University
 Year Elected:  1998
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Alexander Jones is Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. In 2017 he became the Leon Levy Director at the Institute. He studies the history of the mathematical and physical sciences in antiquity, particularly Greco-Roman and Babylonian astronomy; Greco-Roman physical and mathematical sciences; and scientific texts on papyri. He is the author of five books, including Pappus of Alexandria, Book 7 (2 volumes, 1986), and about forty articles. His edition of the Oxyrhynchus astronomical and astrological papyri, the largest collection ever published, with translation and full technical commentary, is a landmark, entirely transforming the modern study of ancient astronomy and astrology and worthy to stand beside O. Neugebauer's "Astronomical Cuneiform Texts" (1955) and A.J. Sachs's and H. Hunger's "Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia" (1988). A graduate of Brown University (Ph.D., 1985), he served on the University of Toronto faculty from 1992-2008.
 
10Name:  Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller
 Institution:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1936
 Death Date:  September 22, 2023
   
 
Evelyn Fox Keller received her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Harvard University, worked for a number of years at the interface of physics and biology, and is now Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of many articles and books, including: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock; Reflections on Gender and Science; Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science; Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology; The Century of the Gene; and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. A new book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, is forthcoming. Between Jan, 2006 and July, 2007, she held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris at REHSEIS.
 
11Name:  Dr. Naomi Oreskes
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2019
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1958
   
 
Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned geologist, science historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including The Rejection of Continental Drift, Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, and in recent decades has been a leading voice on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. Her research focuses on the earth and environmental sciences, with a particular interest in understanding scientific consensus and dissent. Her 2004 essay "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad, including in the Royal Society’s publication, "A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskes
 
12Name:  Mr. Robert McCracken Peck
 Institution:  Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Drexel University)
 Year Elected:  2022
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1952
   
 
Robert McCracken Peck, Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is a writer, naturalist, and historian who has traveled extensively in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. He served as Special Assistant to the Academy's President and Director of the Academy's Natural History Museum before being named Fellow of the Academy in 1983. In 2000 he assumed additional responsibilities as the Academy's Curator of Art and Artifacts and Editor of Scientific Publications. From 2003-2007 he served as Librarian of the Academy. In 2003 he was named Senior Fellow of the Academy. Peck is the author of six books: The Natural History of Edward Lear (2016, 2018, and 2021), (Specimens of Hair (2018), Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America (1990), Headhunters and Hummingbirds: An Expedition into Ecuador (1987), A Celebration of Birds: The Life and Art of Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1982), and William Bartram's Travels (1980); the co-author of two: A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science (2012) and All In The Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (2008), and has written chapters for dozens of others. He has also written for a wide range of popular and scholarly magazines including: Audubon, Natural History, National Wildlife, International Wildlife, Nature, Arts, Antiques, Image, Terra, Explore, Landscope (Australia), The Journal for Maritime Research, Polar Record, The Explorers Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. His 1990 book, Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America, was the companion volume to an 8-part B.B.C./P.B.S. television series of the same title which dealt with the discovery and exploration of America from a natural history point of view. Within weeks of its appearance in Great Britain, Mr. Peck's book went onto the U.K. Best-Seller List, where it remained for nine weeks (reaching the #3 slot in April, 1990). The German edition, Im Land Des Adlers (1992) also achieved Best-Seller status. The book was selected by the New York Times for its list of notable books for the year. An active member of the Explorers Club (whose Philadelphia chapter has recognized him its Explorers Award), Mr. Peck has developed a special interest in the history of exploration, retracing the travel routes of a number of 18th and 19th century naturalists including: William Bartram, John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander Von Humboldt, John Burroughs and John Muir. He has served as a natural history consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, Readers Digest Books, David Attenborough and the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.). In 1989 a new species of South American frog (one of three new species he discovered during an expedition to Ecuador) was named in his honor. In 1991 Mr. Peck was honored by the Academy of Natural Sciences' Richard Hopper Day Medal for his work in interpreting natural history to the public. (Other recipients of the medal have included: Jacques Piccard, Louis Leakey, Ruth Patrick, David Attenborough, Lewis Thomas, Gerald Durrell, Stephen Ambrose, Sylvia Earle, and Elizabeth Kolbert.) He has also received Philadelphia’s Wyck-Strickland Award for outstanding contributions to the cultural life of Philadelphia and the Garden Club of America’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal for environmental writing. He has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Houghton Library (1994-1995 and 2010-2011), and at the Yale Center for British Art (1997); and has twice been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome (2014 and 2017). He was granted an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by the University of Delaware in 2012. His other honors have included an award for courage and integrity from the Philadelphia and St. Louis chapters of the Explorers Club, and the David S. Ingalls, Jr. Award for Excellence from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Founders Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History (2021), and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Wagner Free Institute of Science (2019). Mr. Peck has traveled widely on behalf of the Academy of Natural Sciences, accompanying research expeditions in Nepal (1983), Ecuador (1984, 1992, and 1998), Venezuela (1985 and 1987), South Africa (1993), Botswana, (1993), Namibia (1993), Siberia (1994), Guyana (1997), and Mongolia (seven expeditions, 1994-2011). He conducted research on the history of science in Russia in 2019. In recognition of his deep knowledge of the cultural and natural history of Mongolia, Mr. Peck was invited by the White House and the U.S. State Department to represent the United States at ceremonies marking Mongolia’s 800th birthday in Ulaan Baatar in July 2006. The two-person presidential delegation consisted of Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns and Mr. Peck. Mr, Peck’s photographs have been published in books, journals, and magazines and exhibited in museums across the U.S. His one-man photographic exhibition documenting nomadic life in Central Asia, has been shown at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology, the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Mongolian Embassy, Washington, D.C.. In 2008 Mr. Peck curated an exhibition and co-authored a book about the British artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894), Charles Darwin’s illustrator and the first person to create life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs (at the Crystal Palace in London in 1854). The book was published in the summer of 2008 and was excerpted to serve as the lead story in Natural History magazine. His book, The Natural History of Edward Lear, published by David R. Godine in the fall of 2016, grew out of an exhibition on the British writer, traveler, and artist that Mr. Peck guest-curated for Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Both the American and the British editions of the book sold out within a year. A Chinese edition, published in 2018, met with equal success. A revised and expanded edition of the book was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Mr. Peck’s book, Specimens of Hair, The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne, was published by Blast Books in 2018. Enhanced by the spectacular photography of Rosamond Purcell, it is a book about an extraordinary collection of wool, fur and hair that was collected by a Philadelphia naturalist in the early 19th century in an effort to better understand the relationships – and commercial application – of these animal products and of humans in a pre- Darwinian world. The book was one of only four selected by Publishers Weekly as a recommended purchase for Christmas 2018 under a category the magazine called “slightly weird and very wonderful.” Favorably reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was featured in a blog in Atlas Obscura (reaching an audience of 5 million people), and in on-line articles for National Geographic and Time Magazine. The book stimulated a 20 minute interview with Mr. Peck about the Browne collection and the subject of hair on NPR’s popular “Science Friday” program.
 
13Name:  Dr. Nancy Siraisi
 Institution:  City University of New York
 Year Elected:  1997
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1932
   
 
Nancy Siraisi is a MacArthur Fellow (2008) and Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has served on the faculty since 1970. Her work spans six centuries of medical history, beginning with a distinguished study of the medieval university of Padua and continuing through the theory and practice of medicine in medieval and Renaissance Italy, a domain she has made her own. Her many books and articles are based on massive excavation of manuscripts and early printed sources and distinguished by their clarity of thought, elegance of argument and lucidity of style; more than half a millennium later, they have illuminated the theories and practices, the works and the lives of learned doctors from the beginning of modern learned medicine in Salerno to the great age of the high Renaissance anatomists. No historian has done more over the last thirty years to prove the vitality, the complexity or the lively interest of pre-modern Europe's traditions of Latin learning.
 
14Name:  Dr. Heinrich von Staden
 Institution:  Institute for Advanced Study
 Year Elected:  1997
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1939
   
 
Heinrich von Staden received his Dr. phil. at Universität Tübingen. A professor at Yale University in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Studies for more than thirty years, he is currently Professor of Classics and History of Science Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the recipient of the Charles Goodwin Award of Merit of the American Philological Association, Best Teacher in the Humanities at Yale University, and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. Dr. von Staden is the author of Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (1989, second edition, 1994); "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art and Literature" (Daedalus, 1976); "Incurability and Hopelessness: The Hippocratic Corpus" (in La maladie et les maladies dans la Collection hippocratique, 1990); and "Body and Machine: Interactions between medicine, mechanisms, and philosophy in early Alexandria" (Alexandria and Alexandrianism, 1995). Heinrich von Staden is a humanistic scholar of extraordinary range and depth, equally at home in literary criticism and in Greek and Latin literature. Internationally, he is recognized as an authority on ancient science and medicine. With his magisterial edition of Herophilus, he established himself as one of no more than three leading scholars in the field. His election to the British Academy and to the Presidency of the Society for Ancient Medicine are but two distinctions that attest to his standing. A teacher in two departments while at Yale, Dr. von Staden has been honored with the endowment of a graduate fellowship and an annual lectureship in his name. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997.
 
Election Year
2022 (1)
2020 (1)
2019 (2)
2017 (1)
2011 (1)
2010 (1)
2006 (1)
2002 (1)
1998 (1)
1997 (2)
1995 (1)
1990 (1)