
New Books in the History of Science
Interviews with historians of science about their new books
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Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This rich, interdisciplinary study by Dr. Stol

Laura Frances Goffman, "Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospit

Violet Moller, "Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Europe" (OneWorld, 2024)
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic. But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be fou

Kathleen Miller, ed., "Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World" (Penn State UP, 2025)
Kathleen Miller talks about her new edited volume, Doctrine and Disease in British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press, 2025). In the sixteenth century, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, about her recent book, Slouch: Postural Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024). Slouch examines t

Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science