Keynote

 

Pamela H. Smith

 

Department of History, Columbia University, New York

 

Pamela H. Smith is Seth Low Professor of History and founding Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University where she teaches history of early modern Europe and the history of science.  She has worked on aspects of craft knowledge and its relationship to science for her entire career.  Her prize-winning books include The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton 1994), and The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 2004).  She has co-edited Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (with Paula Findlen, Routledge 2002); Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800 (with Benjamin Schmidt, Chicago 2008); The Matter of Art: Materials, Technologies, Meanings, c. 1250-1650 (with Christy Anderson and Anne Dunlop, Manchester 2015); Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (with Amy Meyers and Harold J. Cook, Chicago 2017), and Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia (Pittsburgh, forthcoming).  She is the author of numerous articles on alchemy, artisans, and the making of vernacular and scientific knowledge.  She has been a Fellow at the Wissenschafts-Kolleg, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Getty Scholar, a Samuel Kress Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among other honors.  In the course of her present research on vernacular knowledge systems of early modern craftspeople (1300-1700), she founded the research and pedagogical initiative, the Making and Knowing Project (http://www.makingandknowing.org/), which investigates craft knowledge from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including hands-on reconstruction of historical techniques.  She has recently begun to study the challenges faced by craftspeople in contemporary society.

(Department of History, Columbia University, MC 2516, 1180 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027; ps2270@columbia.edu)

 

 

Plenary Sessions

 

Gadi Algazi

 

History Department, Tel Aviv University

 

Gadi Algazi is professor of history at Tel Aviv University and associate fellow at the international research center ‘Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History’ at the Humboldt University Berlin. He was senior editor of the journal History & Memory (2001–2012) and is member of the editorial board of Past and Present. Research interests: Late medieval and early modern social-cultural history, with an emphasis on historical anthropology and gender history; the history and theory of the social sciences; settler colonialism and frontier societies.

 

 

 

Raz Chen-Morris

 

History Department,  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

Professor Raz Chen-Morris researches Renaissance and early modern science, especially the history of the mathematical sciences (astronomy and optics) and the life, work and thought of Johannes Kepler. His major publications to date are two books on early modern science: together with Ofer Gal Baroque Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); and more recently Measuring Shadows- Kepler's Optics of Invisibility (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016).

 

 

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Yossef Schwartz

 

Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University 

 

Professor Yossef Schwartz is the head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is Professor of medieval and early modern Intellectual history at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at and was the director of the Institute from 2009 until 2015. He held the Martin Buber Chair for Jewish philosophy of religion at the department of evangelical theology, Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, 2000-2002. Further teaching/research positions at the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is the winner of an ERC Research Grant, dedicated to the study of the translation of "Latin philosophy into Hebrew" and an ISF Research Grant, dedicated to Christian Hebraism and Christian Cabbala. His present GIF project, together with prof Andreas Speer from the Thomas Institute in Cologne is dedicated to “Arabic-into-Hebrew-into-Latin: The Latin Translation of Maimonides’ Guide. Critical Edition, History and Cultural Context“.

 

 

 

Nurit Golan

 

Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University 

 

Nurit Golan is currently affiliated with the Cohn Institute for the Study of Philosophy, History and Sociology of Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel. After graduating from Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, Nurit taught literature at the Open University, was a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and at the School of Education at Tel Aviv University where she published several papers and teachers’ guidebooks. Nurit was also a co-editor of the Film Magazine of the Israeli Film Institute. She translated several novels for young readers, from German, English, and Norwegian into Hebrew. Twelve years ago Nurit began studying art history as well as philosophy and history of the sciences at Tel Aviv University. She wrote her Master thesis on the Norman mosaics of Sicily and did her Ph.D. research on the Creation Sculptures in the Upper-Rhine Churches in the fourteenth century, instructed by Profs. Pinkus and Schwarz. She received her Ph.D. in August of 2015.

Her research deals with medieval artifacts as documents attesting to social and intellectual changes in the medieval society. She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book.

 

 

 

Einat Klafter

 

Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University 

 

Einat Klafter co-heads the Exceptional Selves Humanities lab at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is a teaching and research associate. She also teaches at the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at Tel Aviv University on Margery Kempe’s critical view of image-aided devotional practices. She completed a post-doc at the University of Geneva and was a visiting fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London and at the Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens at the ETH in Zurich. Einat’s research interests focus on construction and conceptualization of sanctity, late-medieval popular devotional practices, female-oriented pilgrimage, and the language of ecstasy in the unio mystica.