Feature Stories

Research Topics

Feature Stories Overview

Deputy Head, Communications Team

Stephanie Hood

+49 30 22667 242/315

shood@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) has published its format “Research Topics” since 2008. Every six to eight weeks, researchers present individual contributions of one relevant aspect of their research or present a new research project. “Research Topics” appear on the home page of the Institute’s website and in a printed version available in the MPIWG’s entrance hall. The online version makes the latest research easily available and offers links to sources, databases, audiovisual material, publications, authors, and partner institutions. Published in German and English, the collection of Research Topics gives a representative picture of the ways in which research is conducted at the Institute. Copies can be ordered in brochure form through the Institute's press contact.

No 28
Thumbnail

Science under Scrutiny

A new project by Etienne Benson explores how endangered species protection reshaped twentieth-century field biology.

MORE
No 27
Thumbnail

The Globalization of Knowledge and its Consequences

A recently published volume, edited by MPIWG director Jürgen Renn and available online, elucidates the processes of the globalization of knowledge in terms of historical-epistemological concept...

MORE
No 26
Thumbnail

Parts Unknown: Making the Familiar Strange

MPIWG artist-in-residence Rohini Devasher explores the interface between art practice and science, specifically drawing and astronomy, through the lens of metaphor.

MORE
No 24
Thumbnail

Endangerment and Its Consequences

A new working group is challenging the taken-for-granted nature of endangerment in contemporary discourse by placing it in conceptual and historical perspective and exploring the situated, cult...

MORE
No 23
Thumbnail

The Equilibrium Controversy

Published in Edition Open Access, a new volume by Jürgen Renn and Peter Damerow sheds fresh light on a major Renaissance controversy: through the equilibrium controversy, key aspects of mechani...

MORE
No 20
Thumbnail

Baby Science in fin-de-siècle America

In her new project, Christine von Oertzen explores why members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in the United States came to focus in the 1880s on the early development of infants and t...

MORE
No 18
Thumbnail

Histories of Scientific Observation

Lorraine Daston, director of the MPIWG, has coedited a book on the histories of scientific observation from the fifth to the late twentieth century which presents studies from the working group...

MORE
No 17
Thumbnail

On Historicizing Epistemology: an Essay

On the occasion of the 65th birthday of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the MPIWG is publishing excerpts from his recent publication On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (Stanford University Press, 2...

MORE
No 16
Thumbnail

Johann Lambert's Conversion to a Geometry of Space

The new Max Planck research group director Vincenzo De Risi is studying the development of a new concept of geometry in the eighteenth century.

MORE
No 15
Thumbnail

The Uncertain Boundaries between Light and Matter

Historian of physics Marta Jordi Taltavull examines the history of optical dispersion, from classical to quantum physics.

MORE
No 14
Thumbnail

Every Move Will Be Recorded

Historian Grégoire Chamayou describes the machinic police utopia in eighteenth-century Paris.

MORE
No 12
Thumbnail

The Concepts of Immanuel Kant’s Natural Philosophy

A new database developed by Wolfgang Lefèvre renders the explicit and implicit networks of concepts in Kant’s natural philosophy.

MORE
No 11
Thumbnail

Jean Piaget and the Child’s Spontaneous Geometry

Barbara Wittmann examines the history of children’s drawings as research objects and instruments in the human sciences and humanities between 1880 and 1950.

MORE