Workshop Speakers

Nikolai Krementsov is Associate Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), Victoria College, University of Toronto. Krementsov published widely on the history of Russian science and medicine in the twentieth century. His books include, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997), The Cure: A story of cancer and politics from the annals for the Cold War (Chicago, 2002), International Science between the World Wars: the case of genetics (London, 2005), A martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago, 2011).

Michelle Murphy's work considers the entangled histories of technoscience, health, economics, environmental politics, and living-being in the recent past using transnational feminist analytics. Her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertaintly: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (Duke UP, 2006) won the 2008 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. She is also the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Feminism, Technoscience, and the Biopolitics of Cold War America (Duke UP, forthcoming) and co-editor of Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (Osiris, 2004). Her current research project, The Economization of Life, explores the interlinked histories of efforts to govern and alter national economies and human biological futures. She is co-organizer with Adele Clarke and Vincanne Adams of a collaborative project called Anticipatioin: Technoscience, Affect, Life; convener, with Natasha Myers, of the Toronto Technoscience Salon; and Coordinator of the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. She is Associate Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.

Ingrid Hehmeyer, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology, is an agricultural engineer who specializes in human-environmental relationships in the arid regions of ancient and mediaeval Arabia. Her current field research focuses on the history of water technology in mediaeval Yemen, where she investigates technical innovations in hydraulic engineering and strategies for water management that allowed people to live under harsh environmental conditions. Part of this project involves a study of the methods of astronomical timekeeping used for allocating water during both day and night. Her second area of research is the history of the medical sciences in the Islamic world. As a licensed pharmacist, she is particularly interested in the use of medicinal substances and their manufacture, and she has studied the pharmaceutical utensils from the mediaeval Islamic period housed at the Royal Ontario Museum. The perpetual menace of disease on the one hand, and of water scarcity on the other – the two most fundamental threats to the basis of life – led people to resort to magical measures in the hope that these might change the course of events. Tangible evidence for this exists in the form of magic-medicinal bowls, talismans, and astrological symbols, which form a major theme in her research. She publishes in several languages in North America, Europe, and the Middle East on topics related to the histories of water technology, astronomy, and history of medicine. Dr. Hehmeyer also is a member of the graduate faculty.

Nicholas Dew teaches early modern European history. He came to McGill in 2004 from Cambridge University, where he was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Research Fellow of St Catharine’s College. His interests are in the cultural history of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the history of science, travel, and oriental studies. His first book, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France  (Oxford University Press, 2009), maps the place of scholarly orientalism within the intellectual culture of France in the late seventeenth century. His current book project is a history of the trans-Atlantic dimensions of French science in the period 1670-1760. With James Delbourgo, he edited Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, 2008), a collection of essays which began life as a workshop at UCLA's Clark Library. Dew has recently been a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, and an Inter-Americas Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. In 2009, he was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for his project "Science and Empire in the French Atlantic World".

Michael Egan is an associate professor of history and director of the Sustainable Future History Project at McMaster University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the histories of science, technology, and sustainability - typically with a global focus. He is the author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007) and is currently working on a global history of knowing and regulating mercury pollution since World War II.

Suzanne Zeller is Professor History and Coordinator of the Minor Programme in HPS at Wilfred Laurier University; and author of Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (1987), which was reissued in the Carleton Library Series in 2009. She teaches Canadian history, history of science and environment, and history of culture and ideas. Her current research project is entitled Fundamental Forms: The Physical World of Victorian Canadians; she is also the Canadian member of Colony, Empire, and Environment, an international Collaborative Research Project under the BOREAS Programme of the European Science Foundation.