Project members
Jenny Beckman is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on the communication of science in print, schools, museums, and conferences, primarily in botany. Her recent publications examine language and exchange practices in scientific publication. She is a postdoctoral member of the project.
Charlotte Bigg is a researcher at CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris and she teaches at EHESS Paris. Currently she is co-PI in the EU-funded project “The Scientific Conference: A Social, Cultural, and Political History” and PI of the French ANR-funded project “Design graphique, recherche et patrimoine des sciences sociales. Le Laboratoire de graphique Jacques Bertin” (Graphic Design, Research and Heritage in the Social Sciences. Jacques Bertin’s Graphics Lab)(2021-2025). She sits on the executive committee of the interdisciplinary project “Origins and Emergence of life” funded by the Paris Observatory/PSL research university. Her publications focus on the spatial, material and visual cultures of science. She is co-editor of the special issue of History of Science due to appear in June 2021 dedicated to “The Spatial Inscription of Science in the Twentieth Century”. She is PI in the project
Laura C. Forster is a Lecturer in Modern British history at Durham University. Laura works on the social and spatial history of ideas; informal internationalisms; social and political activism; and the relationship between scientific and political communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published in The Historical Journal, The Journal of European Ideas, and History Workshop Journal. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the project in 2019-2020 and remains an associated member.
Georgiana Kotsou is a PhD candidate at the History Department of Maastricht University, investigating international chemistry conferences and the forms of sociability developed in them during the course of the 20th century. Using the collections at the Science History Institute, she focuses on the Congresses organized by the Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the Gordon Research Conferences. She is particularly interested in the rituals and routines of conference culture and their role in scientific identity formation, community building, and knowledge production.
Thomas Mougey is a postdoctoral member of the project at the Centre Alexandre Koyré. His research focuses on the emergence and standardisation of the scientific conference as public space. His case study particularly examines the ways in which public spaces of world fairs and international scientific congresses mutually evolved and interacted at the Universal Expositions organized between 1889 and 1937. Thomas works on science and international relations in the twentieth century as well as the spatial, material and visual culture of science. His most recent publication is ‘Building UNESCO science from the “dark zone”: Joseph Needham, Empire, and the wartime reorganization of international science from China, 1942-6′, History of Science, (2021).
Jane Mumby is a postdoctoral member of the project team based at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Internationalism. Her research interests centre on the evolution and development of international organisations during the twentieth-century and, for this project, is focussed on the efforts – via conference – to formalise the administration of these institutions in the early 1940s.
Jessica Reinisch is Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Histories of Internationalism book series, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Internationalism at Birkbeck. She was PI of a Wellcome-funded research group on internationalism, ‘The Reluctant Internationalists’. Publications include ‘What makes an expert? The view from UNRRA, 1943-1947’, in: Frank Trentmann et al, Work in Progress: Economy and Environment in the Hands of Experts (Oekom, 2018), and, with David Brydan, Internationalists in European History (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is PI of the project.
Geert Somsen is Associate Professor of history of science at Maastricht University and the Vrije Universiteit, both in the Netherlands. His research focuses on science and international relations. Recent publications include “The Princess at the Conference. Science, Pacifism, and Habsburg Society”, History of Science (2021) and “Science, Fascism, and Foreign Policy: the Exhibition Scienza Universale at the 1942 Rome World’s Fair”, Isis (2017). He has held visiting positions at several institutions, among others as Marie Curie Fellow at Columbia University from 2014 to 2017. Somsen is PI in the project.
Sven Widmalm is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. He has most recently been the leader of a project on intellectual relations between Sweden and Nazi Germany. Publications include Communicating the history of medicine: Perspectives on audices and impact (Manchester UP 2020, ed. with Solveig Jülich) and Intellectual Collaboration with the Third Reich: Treason or Reason? (Routledge 2021, ed. With Maria Björkman and Patrik Lundell). Widmalm is PL in the project.
Affiliated members
Mariana Castillo Deball is an award-winning artist currently based in Berlin. She uses a repertoire of techniques to explore aspects of materiality in historical identity formation. She has exhibited widely in Latin America, Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
Waqar Zaidi is Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is also a Member at the Institute for Advanced Studies Princeton for 2020–21, 2021 Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, and a Research Affiliate at the Future of Humanities Institute at the University of Oxford. Waqar’s research focuses on the relationship(s) between technology and international relations in the twentieth century. His first book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in June 2021, titled Technological Internationalism and World Order: Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace 1920-1950. His most recent published article was: “Scientists as Political Experts: Atomic Scientists and Their Claims for Expertise on International Relations, 1945-1947”, Centaurus 63(1) (2021), 17-31. He is currently working on a monograph on US technical and financial assistance for civil aviation in the Near East in the 1950s.
Advisory board
Brigitte Van Tiggelen, Science history Institute
Anne Rasmussen, EHESS, Centre Alexandre Koyré
Jenny Anderson, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University
Nico Randeraad, Maastricht University
Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham
