HPS Work-in-progress seminars: Semester 1, 2023/24

Work-in-progress seminars are all on Tuesdays in Botany House 1.03, 12:00-13:00 (PM). All of them will be in hybrid format.

You are welcome to bring along some lunch and carry on the conversation afterwards (13:00-14:00) as well! Note: this will sometimes have to be 13:00-13:30 (term 1, 23/24).

If any queries: Stefan Bernhardt-Radu; prsbr@leeds.ac.uk

All the sessions can be accessed via zoom here:

Zoom link / Meeting-ID: 878 1247 4624 (if logging without a university account, a code is requested; either look at the weekly-circulated HPS research digests; or e-mail Stefan for the code)

Online Word Document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ceaMJCsINef1y5yet9Op4GuQP3sGfRFyL4Mwh9qKU2Y/edit?usp=sharing

October 3: Welcome: HPS Meet, Greet & Lunch

October 10: Jon Topham “Really Useful Knowledge”

October 17: Jamie Stark “Microbes for All: starting to make histories of culture collections”

October 24: Yihan Jiang “A Theory of Causation for Ontic Structural Realists”

October 31: B.V.E. Hyde “Rethinking Conflicts of Interest”

ROOM CHANGE! BAINES WING 1.16. November 7: Adrian Wilson “The eighteenth-century Great Instauration: next steps”

November 14: Josh Hillman “A new approach to the Industrial Revolution; or, is my JRF proposal any good?”

November 21: Franziska Kohlt, “Childish Things?: The uses of books with – and without – pictures and conversations in the SDUK’s ‘Libraries’” (Note: Fran Kohlt’s talk has been moved from, while Alex King’s to, the 5th of December).

November 28: Jon Hodge and Greg Radick, “Darwin, Wallace and Counterfactual History”

December 5: Alexander King “An encyclopaedia for the working class? Audience and readership for nineteenth reference works”

 

Call for EPSA fellows

The Leeds centre for History and Philosophy of Science is proud to join the list of institutions offering to host a fellow in the 2023 fellowship scheme of EPSA – the European Philosophy of Science Association.

These fellowships are designed to foster collaboration between philosophers of science working in Eastern Europe with their colleagues in Western Europe. This year the scheme’s usual focus on Junior scholars from Eastern Europe has been expanded, so that senior and mid-career researchers are also eligible if they have been adversely affected by the war in Ukraine, in accordance with EPSA’s published statement https://philsci.eu/news/12655704.

Leeds’ Centre for HPS will host a fellow for up to one month, and contribute up to 1500 euros towards travel, accommodation and living expenses. During that time, the successful candidate will be a member of the centre and will be invited to participate in all our research activities. We are soliciting applications for fellowships in the areas of: Philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, metaphysics of science, explanation, causality, evolution, natural kinds, mechanisms, conservation metaphysics, cultural evolution, biological individuality or metaphysics of race.

Applicants should send a cv, covering letter explaining their motivation, research propoosal, and statement explaining why Leeds is a good fit, to epsa.fellowships@hpsleeds by April 17th.

For further details please see the EPSA website fellowships page https://philsci.eu/fellowships or write to Ellen Clarke at e.clarke@leeds.ac.uk

Royal Society history of science prize

The deadline for the Royal Society’s Notes and Records award for an essay in the history of science, technology or medicine is 28 February. Open to anyone within 5 years of having completed their PhD. More information here.

Otley Science Festival

Visiting Fellow Kersten Hall will be talking about Leeds’ Florence Bell, ‘the forgotten heroine of DNA’, at this year’s Otley Science Festival on 18 November!

More information here …

Kersten Hall’s book on William Astbury

Science writer and Visiting Fellow in HPS Kersten Hall‘s book, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and How Wool Wove a Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix, is now out in paperback!

Astbury came to Leeds as a Lecturer in Textile Physics in 1928 and devised an X-ray camera to study wool fibres. (And a lock of Mozart’s hair.) This led to his research assistant Florence Bell producing the very first x-ray images of DNA. In doing so, she ‘quietly laid the foundations for one of the biggest landmarks in 20th century science: the discovery of the structure of DNA’, as Kersten puts it in his article on Bell for The Conversation. Watch a short video of Kersten talking about it and its relationship to the much more famous ‘Photo 51’ here.

We still have Astbury’s camera at Leeds in our Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and it features as one of the objects in our ‘History of Science in 20 objects‘ resource. (It’s Object 11.)