Fields of Expertise:
history of science and its cultural, social, and political relations; comparative world history; European intellectual history; 19th- and 20th-century German history
Selected publications and presentations:
- “The ‘Inner Necessity’ of a Reluctantly Public Intellectual: James Franck as Leader of the Physics Community under Political Pressure,” University of Chicago Physics Department, 20 May 2021.
- “What Was Charles Darwin Doing on HMS Beagle? The Origins of Evolutionary Theory as World History and Personal Story,” Lewis & Clark College Library Special Collections, 2 Nov. 2017.
- “Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Disciplinary Anthropomorphism in Biophysics in Inter-War Europe,” University of Washington, Northwest Workshop on History and Philosophy of Science, 24 Oct. 2015.
- “Exhuming the Three-Man Paper: Target-Theoretical Research in the 1930s and 1940s.” In Creating a Physical Biology: The Three-Man Paper and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. Brandon Fogel and Phillip Sloan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 99-142.
- “Boundaries and Authority in the Physics Community in the Third Reich.” In The German Physical Society in the Third Reich, ed. Dieter Hoffmann and Mark Walker, 22-49. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- “Physics and the Ideology of Non-Ideology.” In Physics and Politics: Research and Research Support in Twentieth Century Germany in International Perspective, ed. Helmuth Trischer and Mark Walker, 85-106. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, vol. 5. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2010.
- “Hostile Environmental Intellectuals? Critiques and Counter-Critiques of Science and Technology in West Germany after 1945.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 31 (2008): 393-406.
- “Maintaining Discipline in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society During the National Socialist Regime.” Minerva 44 (2006): 251-66.
- “Freie Wissenschaft und entlassene Wissenschaftler: Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft 1933 und 1945.” [Free Science and Purged Scientists: The Kaiser Wilhelm Society 1933 and 1945]. Trans. Birgit Kolboske. Ergebnisse, no. 16. Berlin: Forschungsprogramm Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus, 2005.
Courses taught:
- HST 387U, History of Modern Science
- HST 390 / HON 407, Pacific Science
- HST 407/507, HON 407, Seminars:
- Science, Ideology, and the State
- European Culture and Politics between the World Wars
- HST 427/527, Topics in History of Science:
- Science Fictions
- Science and Nazism
- The Atomic Age
- Darwin and Darwinism
- Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
- HST 458/558, Modern German History
- HST 460/560, History of the Human Sciences (Topics in European Intellectual History)
- HST 490/590, Empires of Knowledge (Comparative World History
- HST 497/597, History Through Film: Dangerous Knowledge