2023 Gordon Cain Conference

Science in Humanities, Humanities in Science: Embedded Connections

Wednesday, October 4, 2023–Friday, October 6, 2023
Science History Institute
315 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

The relationship between STEM fields and humanities fields typically gets discussed in terms of observation, exchange, and travel. On the surface, specialists in the humanities appear to scrutinize and critique the questions, methods, or conclusions of the sciences and vice versa. Specialists from the sciences may borrow from, visit, or embed themselves in the humanities, or vice versa. Interdisciplinary and translational initiatives coax specialists of all sorts out of their disciplinary territories to examine and address complex problems together.

In practice, the ways of thinking associated with the sciences and with the humanities tend to come together within these fields. Working squarely within their own disciplines, humanists often contemplate materials, environments, technologies, and physical and biological processes—the stuff of STEM. Similarly, across academia, service professions, and industries, the work of STEM involves values, context, creativity, and complexity—hallmarks of humanistic thinking. Disciplines such as environmental history, industrial design, and archaeology take up questions one can only answer—or even ask—by thinking in both kinds of ways at once.

This year’s Cain Conference brings together scholars and practitioners who have consciously developed and deployed such embedded connections, cultivating the humanistic dimension of STEM and heed for the STEM that’s within the humanities in pursuit of scholarship, advocacy, or business goals. It also brings together historians and social scientists of science, technology, medicine, and the environment who have studied how such embedded thinking has worked within different disciplinary (or non-disciplinary!) institutions and intellectual cultures, past and present.

What can specialists in humanities fields learn from how specialists in STEM disciplines understand and go about humanistic thinking, and vice versa? What can those “moonlighting” in this fashion learn by putting their methods side by side with those of specialists? Are “STEM” and “humanities” accurate or useful shorthands for the kinds of thinking in question? Are there better ways of classifying disciplines? How do practitioners in intrinsically multi-modal fields rework humanistic and technical thinking by bringing them together? What makes individual and collaborative work of this sort succeed or fail, and what are the standards for judging?

We approach these questions from a place of curiosity about what can be learned through comparisons, conversations, and disagreements between embedded thinking and that of specialists, acknowledging the authority of experts but not assuming that embedded connections can or should always follow exactly the same standards.

Conference Organizers

Jeremy A. Greene is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, director of the Department of the History of Medicine, and director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He also practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center. His research explores the ways in which medical technologies influence our understanding of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal, on personal, regional, and global scales. Among his publications are The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). His newest research project, Syringe Tide: Disposable Technologies and the Making of Medical Waste, focuses on the scientific, social, and economic basis of the shift towards disposable technologies in hospitals and clinics that have made the healthcare industry one of the largest carbon-emitting and plastic waste-producing sectors of the global economy.

Dolly Jørgensen is a professor of history at the University of Stavanger, Norway (UiS). She is a coeditor in chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and codirects the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at UiS. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animal extinction and recovery, particularly the implications of extinction for cultural heritage and museum practices. Her book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging was published by MIT Press in 2019. She has published widely in environmental history and environmental humanities, including four coedited volumes: New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (2013); Northscapes: History, Technology & the Making of Northern Environments (2013); Visions of North in Premodern Europe (2018); and Silver Linings: Clouds in Art & Science (2020).

Victoria Lee is an associate professor in the History Department at Ohio University and director of the Technology and Society Certificate. She is a historian of modern science and technology, with a focus on the role of Japan in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book, The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2021) looks at Japanese society’s engagement with microbes in science, industry, and environmental management. It explores how fermentation expanded beyond small-scale traditional manufactures to take special prominence in food, resources, and medicine, addressing the role of scientists and technicians in defining the texture of everyday life and material culture as an aspect of political economy, demonstrating that knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Mediapart.

Amy Slaton is a professor in the Department of History at Drexel University. She holds a PhD in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught courses in the history of American science, technology, and architecture, as well as in U.S. labor history and race relations. Among her publications are Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010). Her current book project is All Good People: Diversity, Difference, and Opportunity in High-Tech America, under contract with MIT Press. She is coeditor, with Tiago Saraiva, of the international journal History+Technology.
 

More Information

Please send all inquiries to embeddedconnections@sciencehistory.org.
 

About the Gordon Cain Conference

The Gordon Cain Conference is a gathering of scholars in the history of science and related fields. Each conference is organized by an eminent scholar who worked with staff to develop a theme of broad contemporary relevance. Centered on a topic chosen by the conference organizer, the conference consists of an evening public lecture, a symposium, and a collected volume. It is hosted by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry and supported by a generous gift from Gordon Cain.
 

Image: “Notebook Containing an Advertisement for The Encyclopedia of Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical,” from the Papers of James Curtis Booth, 1850.
Past Conferences, 1998−2022

2022

Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together
Organized by Alexandra (Alix) Hui, Mississippi State University; Lissa L. Roberts, University of Twente; and Seth Rockman, Brown University
 

2021

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War
Organized by Maria Rentetzi, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
 

2018

Where to Put It All? Some Thoughts about Collections, Museums, and History
Organized by Steven Conn, Miami University
 

2017

Chemistry in the Americas, 1500–1800
Organized by John Christie, University of Oxford, and Carin Berkowitz, Science History Institute

My Data, My Self: A Century of Self-Tracking Health Technologies
Organized by Deanna Day, Amanda L. Mahoney, and Ramya M. Rajagopalan, Science History Institute
 

2016

Life in the Universe: Past and Present
Organized by David DeVorkin, National Air and Space Museum
 

2015

Curators, Popularizers, and Showmen: Science in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Exhibitions and Museums
Organized by Bernard Lightman, York University
 

2014

Chemical Reactions: Chemistry and Global History
Organized by Lissa L. Roberts, University of Twente
 

2013

Sensing Change: Environmental Issues in Art and Science
Organized by Dehlia Hannah, Arizona State University
 

2012

E pluribus unum: Bringing Biological Parts and Wholes into Philosophical Perspective
Organized by Lynn Nyhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Scott Lidgard, Field Museum of Natural History
 

2011

Chemical Weather and Chemical Climate: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective
Organized by Jim Fleming, Colby College
Request the collected volume.
 

2010

Personalizing Medicine Here and Now: Empirical Studies of Post-Genomic Medicine
Organized by Alberto Cambrosio, McGill University
 

2009

Technology Transfer and Diffusion in Comparative Perspective
Organized by Bruce Seely, Michigan Technological University
 

2008

The Dilemma of Dual Use
Organized by Roy MacLeod, University of Sydney
 

2007

New Chemical Bodies
Organized by Jody A. Roberts, Science History Institute
Request the whitepaper.
 

2006

Towards a History and Philosophy of Expertise
Organized by Christopher Hamlin, University of Notre Dame
 

2005

Nano before There Was Nano: Historical Perspectives on the Constituent Communities of Nanotechnology
Organized by Cyrus C. M. Mody, Cornell University
 

2004

City, Industry, and Environment in Transatlantic Perspective
Organized by Donna Rilling, State University of New York at Stony Brook
 

2003

Risk and Safety in Medical Innovation
Organized by Arthur Daemmrich, Cornell University

2002

Industry and Governance: Changing Relations among Science-Based Corporations, Government, and the Public
Organized by Arthur Daemmrich, Cornell University
 

2001

The Chemical Industry and the Environment
Organized by Christian W. Simon, University of Basel, Switzerland
 

1999

Pharmaceutical Innovation: Revolutionizing Human Health
Organized by David B. Sicilia, University of Maryland
 

1998

The Twentieth-Century American Chemical Industry
Organized by Stephen B. Adams, Lucent Technologies