Category: History of Science Medicine and Technology

Pablo Gómez Publishes Book: Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality

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UW–Madison History Professor Pablo F. Gómez recently published a new book with University of Chicago Press. Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking …

Devin Kennedy Publishes Book: Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy

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UW–Madison History Professor Devin Kennedy recently published a new book, Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy, with Columbia University Press. Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in …

Gregg Mitman Awarded Distinguished Civilian Honor by the Republic of Liberia

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UW–Madison Emeritus Professor Gregg Mitman received the award of Knight Commander, Humane Order of African Redemption, one of the highest honors conferred by the Republic of Liberia. The distinguished honor was given by the President of the Republic of Liberia in a ceremony on July 24, 2025, celebrating the country’s 178th Independence Day. The award …

Florence Hsia and Devin Kennedy Help Achieve NEH Grant for a New Center for Humanistic Inquiry Into AI and Uncertainty

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Over the last two years, Professors Florence Hsia and Devin Kennedy have played key roles in an interdisciplinary effort to rethink how artificial intelligence is studied on campus. Working as part of a team led by Associate Dean Grant Nelsestuen, Hsia and Kennedy helped lay the intellectual and institutional groundwork for what is now the …

Judith Houck Publishes New Book: Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement

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The University of Chicago Press has published Professor Judith Houck’s new book, Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. The work highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women’s health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces. The women’s health movement …

Pablo Gómez Awarded NEH Collaborative Grant

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Professor Pablo Gomez, in collaboration with Adriana Chira from Emory University, was awarded a highly competitive National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) collaborative grant for his project “Value, Self-Worth, and the Market in the Black Spanish Caribbean in the Age of Slavery.” This grant, whose final product will be a monograph, was one of only …

Susan Lederer Awarded WARF Named Professorship

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Professor Susan Lederer has been awarded a WARF Named Professorship. Five faculty across campus have been awarded WARF Named Professorships, which come with $100,000, and honor faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities. Award recipients …

New Faculty Member in Medical History and Bioethics

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Professor Dana Landress has joined the Department of History as an Assistant Professor of Medical History and Bioethics. She is a historian of 19th and 20th century medicine and public health in the United States. Her research examines the relationship between nutritional disease, community health work, and the political economy of capitalism in the U.S. …

2022-23 Teaching Assistant Award Winners in the Department of History

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Two teaching assistants from the Department of History, Ludwig Decke and Emma Wathen, have received a Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards. These awards recognize their excellence in teaching. Ludwig and Emma both received the Early Excellence in Teaching Award. Ludwig Decke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, specializing in the intersection of Jewish, …

Alumnus Mark Solovey Publishes New Book

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Congratulations to alumnus Mark Solovey (PhD, 1996) on the publication of his newest book, Social Science for What? Battles Over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020). “In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became …