CfP: Classifications and Categories in the Early Sciences (Utrecht, July 2019)

Call for Papers: Classifications and Categories in the Early Sciences

The Early Sciences Forum invites papers exploring systems of classification across the many disciplines that constitute the early sciences. We especially invite papers that closely examine the particular ways in which historical contexts shaped how natural philosophers, scientific practitioners, and scholars organized and categorized people, plants, nature, and ideas. The panel will juxtapose perspectives from the different times and places that make up the early sciences. We will question whether early scientific categories allow for meaningful or even valid comparisons between cultures and periods. As always we invite participants to reflect on how the categories and classifications of the early sciences speak to our modern categories of science, nature, and the body and how they might reorient scholarship in the history of science.

This panel will take place at the 2019 History of Science Society meeting in Utrecht, Netherlands (23-27 July). We welcome papers focusing on any geographical region or discipline among the early sciences. Topics may include, but are not limited to, types of classifications within specific disciplines; categories of people, plants, nature or ideas in specific scientific traditions or in comparative perspective; science, nature or the body as categories; or early classifications of scientific disciplines.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words to Anne-Laurence Caudano (a.caudano@uwinnipeg.ca) or Hannah Marcus (hmarcus@fas.harvard.edu) by 31 December.