Speakers
Description
Presenter: Rob Iliffe and Derya Gurses Tarbuck
Title of the paper: Newtonianisms in Action: the Making of a Global Movement
This chapter challenges the long-standing notion of a “universal” Newtonianism by situating it within the global turn in the history of science. Newtonianism, we argue, never possessed the conceptual unity to claim universal validity; rather, what made it distinctive was the geographical breadth of its circulation. Recent scholarship demonstrates that scientific knowledge does not travel in a linear, uniform manner, but is continually adapted, reconfigured, and contested within local contexts. Building on Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, we treat Newtonianism as a“science-in-the-making” and Show that its claims to universality emerged through the stabilization of controversies and the silencing of alternatives.
Presenter: Kapil Raj
Title of the paper: What does it Take to Make Science Global? Moving Mesmerism from France to Britain to Colonial India in the mid-19th Century
As the positivist foundations of the history of science weakened in the 1960s and 70s, attention radically shifted from recounting its inexorable progress grounded in a perception of knowledge as being disembodied and universal — an ‘everywhere and nowhere’ view — to demonstrating the crucial importance of the historical, cultural, social, gendered and geographical contexts of its production. In this post-positivist view, then, science is locally created, and only subsequently, through a series of investments and deliberate strategies, does it become transferable beyond its place of elaboration. Circulation has thus become a crucial problematic. Science is then not simply diffused thanks to its universal nature, but is locally created, and only subsequently, through a series of investments and deliberate strategies, does it become mobile and circulate beyond its site of elaboration.
This talk will describe some of these strategies and investments and will use the example of mesmerism in the mid-19th century to illustrate the efforts required to universalise a practice that was born and developed within the intellectual and political context of post-Revolutionary France.
Short Biography
Derya Gürses Tarbuck is an Associate Professor of History at Bahçeşehir University, specializing in the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, early modern science, and sociability in eighteenth-century Britain. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Bilkent University (2004), with a dissertation on Anti-Newtonian Cosmologies. Her research explores anti-Newtonian thought, the intersection of science and religion, and the role of intellectual networks in shaping Enlightenment discourse.
She has held prestigious fellowships, including a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge’s Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (2009) and the Kanner Fellowship in British Studies at UCLA’s Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies (2007–2008). She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (2004–2005), where she studied Duncan Forbes of Culloden and Hutchinsonian thought.
Her research on Newtonianism and anti-Newtonianism in Scotland has appeared in journals such as History of European Ideas, Eighteenth-Century Thought, and Academia Letters. Her monograph, Enlightenment Reformation: A Study of Hutchinsonianism (Routledge, 2017), provides a critical reassessment of counter-Enlightenment thought in Britain. She has also explored women’s intellectual sociability, notably in her upcoming work on The Fair Intellectual Club, a women's intellectual society in eighteenth-century Edinburgh.
Her current research focuses on the global reception of Newtonianism, early modern scientific networks, and the historiography of science and religion in the Enlightenment.
Kapil Raj is a historian of science and technology specializing in the circulation of knowledge between Europe and Asia in the early modern and modern periods. He served as Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Among his works is the influential book Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (2007).
| Keywords | Mesmerism, circulation of science, colonial knowledge, local contexts, universality strategies, France, Britain, India, nineteenth century science, Newtonianism, global history of science, circulation and adaptation, science in action (Latour), universality vs. locality, controversies and stabilization, eighteenth century science |
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| dgurses@gmail.com | |
| Affiliation | Bahcesehir University |
| Position | Associate Professor of History of Science |
