Conecta.

The History Department at Binghamton University, State University of New York, seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Premodern Medicine beginning in Fall 2015. Candidates for this position should have an active research agenda that engages with the history of medicine between c. 800 CE and the onset of the scientific revolution, c. 1500 CE, and that provides a perspective on material and visual cultures. Historians whose research encompasses medicine and medical culture in the Mediterranean World, broadly defined, including the Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean, are encouraged to apply, as well as historians of science whose research intersects with the world of premodern medicine. The successful candidate will continue the Department's strong tradition in scholarly research, graduate training, and undergraduate teaching. This position is affiliated with the recently established Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence in Material and Visual Worlds ( http://...

Jens Lachmund. Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Illustrations. 336 pp. $42.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01859-3; $28.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-31241-7. Reviewed by Kristin Poling (University of Rochester) Published on H-German (October, 2014) Commissioned by Chad Ross How Ecologists Found Nature in the City Jens Lachmund's study of urban nature in twentieth-century Berlin begins with a discussion of the opening of the Südgelände Nature Park in March 2000. Located on the site of an abandoned rail yard, the Südgelände does not look like a traditional city park. It is densely overgrown and crisscrossed by walkways constructed of rusty metal—evoking the site's industrial past—that keep visitors from disturbing the vegetation. For most of the long history of urban green space planning, the plants that flourish here as a result of the site's long dereliction would have been consid...

Sarah Dry. The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton's Manuscripts. New York: Oxford University Press , 2014. 256 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-995104-8. Reviewed by Rebekah Higgitt (University of Kent) Published on H-Albion (October, 2014) Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth Aimed at a wider audience than just academics, The Newton Papers tells the story of Isaac Newton’s archive from the time of his death to the present day. Drawing on existing scholarship, it is a story well worth sharing with anyone interested in Newton and how we have, over three hundred years, come to know him and shaped his legacy. Sarah Dry has a colorful and intriguing cast of characters on which to draw, who represent a surprisingly varied set of motives for engaging with Newton’s life and literary remains. They include, naturally, the Cambridge heirs of Newtonian mathematical physics, like George Stokes, but also bibliophiles and collectors, like J. M. Keynes...

Craig Martin. Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press , 2011. 224 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214-0187-4. Reviewed by Arianna Borrelli (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) Published on H-PhysicalSciences (September, 2014) Commissioned by Marta Jordi Taltavull Renaissance Aristotelianism and Meteorology Renaissance meteorology is a highly complex cultural constellation comprising a broad range of interconnected practices of observation, description, explanation, prediction, and interpretation of phenomena of (mostly) meteorological, climatological, or geophysical nature. Because of the economic, social, and political relevance of weather and climate in the early modern period, the importance of Renaissance meteorology for historical research can hardly be overestimated. Nonetheless, as Craig Martin notes, this fascinating subject has hitherto received little attention and Martin's book makes a valuable contribut...

‘Environment(s) in Public?’ Workshop, University of East Anglia, 2-3rd November 2014 Co-organised by the Science in Public Network; 3S research group; and Broads Authority Researchers studying the interactions between science and society argue that rather than thinking about ‘the public’, models of multiple ‘publics’ interacting with specific, situated scientific ideas offers a better way of understanding scientific communication, public engagement and policy impact. However, this risks losing sight of broader concepts such as public debate, the public interest, or what it means to say or do something in public. In turn, we can ask what does it mean to talk about ‘the environment’? Given that many passionately engaged environmental debates have been focused on and in particular places, would it help to abandon this abstraction and instead talk about places: particular ‘environments’ and how they are changing? Could it be more productive to ground environmental debates in mor...