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Department Affiliates
and Associates
By its very nature, the history of science draws upon disciplines, techniques, and scholarship that go beyond the narrow confines of the field. For this reason, the department has established a relatively small register of program Affiliates (OU faculty and others within the University whose teaching or scholarship contributes to the history of science) and program Associates (scholars outside the University with related interests). Affiliates and Associates have the opportunity to work closely with students in our program, as either a formal or informal member of Master's or Ph.D. committees and participate in the department's colloquia.
Department Affiliates
- Luis Cortest
- Lawrence Frank
- Tibor J. Herczeg
- Catherine Hobbs
- Sandie Holguin
- David Levy
- Judith Lewis
- Roberta Magnusson
- Timothy S. Murphy
- Su Fang Ng
- Donald J. Pisani
- Robert A. Rundstrom
- Ronald Schleifer
- Norman Stillman
Department Associates
Luis Cortest
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and LinguisticsMedieval Philosophy, Spanish Thomism and the History of Spanish thought
The central focus of my research is the History of Spanish Thomistic/ Aristotelian thought. In order to understand this subject I have been studying the works of St. Thomas Aquinas for the past 15 years. My view is that one can not understand the Spanish Thomists without a broad knowledge of the works of the master. I have also spent several years collecting materials on the Spanish “School of Salamanca.” These authors (Francisco de Vitoria, Melchior Cano, Domingo Báñez, Domingo de Soto etc.) were theologians and canonists who participated in the important debates surrounding the Spanish Conquest of the New World in the sixteenth century. All of these writers were Thomists who defended the fundamental human status of the Native peoples of America. These thinkers are also extremely important in the development of Modern International Law. Recently, I submitted a book manuscript for publication entitled: “The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter with Modernity.” This book is a consideration of Thomistic Natural Law and its conflict with Enlightenment “rights” theories.
Lawrence Frank
Department of EnglishProfessor Frank's publications include Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self (University of Nebraska Press, 1984); an essay on Freud and Dora in Psychic Seduction (University of Illinois Press, 1989); and articles on the fiction of Dickens, Doyle, and Poe in the Dickens Studies Annual (1999), Nineteenth-Century Literature (1989, 1995, 1999), and Signs (1996). His writing covers nineteenth-century science, detective fiction, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of "Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigation of Poe, Dickens and Doyle" is available through Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. In his undergraduate and graduate teaching, Professor Frank is engaged in new-historical approaches to the discipline of intellectual history and in the application of such approaches to nineteenth-century science and literature. Each of his courses “is designed as a writing course in which students engage in the art of literary analysis.”
Tibor J. Herczeg
Department of Physics and AstronomyThe so-called close or interacting binary stars (with periods usually from 1-2 hours to 1-2 days) are important since by monitoring their slow changes we may gain insight into the structure and evolution of stellar systems. Close binaries have been studied at the OU Observatory for nearly sixty years, concentrating on their orbital periods which can be determined with an accuracy of 1 part in 108. For such studies the OU Observatory has about 20,000 archival plates at its disposal, but recent research is mainly carried out by using the facilities of national (Kitt Peak) or international (CTIO in Chile) states. Close binaries and eruptive variable stars (e.g. novae) are also studied in the UV and X-ray regions from orbiting observatories. Present work is concentrated on binaries with a compact component (e.g. neutron stars, black holes).
A rather different avenue of my research is directed toward historical studies in astronomy and astrophysics, using the exceptionally good library of the History of Science Collection at OU.
Catherine Hobbs
Department of EnglishProfessor Hobbs works in rhetoric/cultural studies in the Composition/ Rhetoric/Literacy program. She is also a member of the Women’s Studies and Liberal Studies faculties and is an associate with the History of Science program. She is the editor of Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write (University of Virginia Press, 1995), and her book "Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo" appeared in fall 2002 from SIU Press. She teaches the history of rhetoric and literacy studies on the graduate level, in addition to undergraduate rhetoric and writing courses. She is currently working on autobiography.
Sandie Holguin
Department of HistoryModern European Intellectual & Cultural History; History of Modern Spain
Holguin's area of specialization is Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History and Modern Spain. She is the author of "Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain." (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2002)
David Levy
David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus
Department of HistoryAmerican intellectual history
My chief scholarly interests are in American intellectual and constitutional history. In addition to articles on various scholarly, popular and university topics, I have published a biography, Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive (Princeton University Press, 1985) and worked as a co-editor of a five volume collection of The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (State University of New York Press, 1971-78; sixth and seventh volumes were published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 and 2002). In addition, I have written a book on The Debate over Vietnam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991/95) and have co-edited a volume of FDR’s Fireside Chats (OU Press, 1992; Penguin Books, 1993) and edited a new edition of William Dean Howells’s 1894 utopian novel, A Traveler from Altruria (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Currently, I am working on a three-volume history of the University of Oklahoma. I teach courses in American intellectual history.
Judith Lewis
Department of History
Program in Women's Studies
Class, Gender and Politics in Britain from the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries
My studies intersect the history of science in many different ways. A 1995 article “The Princess of Parallelograms and her Daughter” in Women's Studies International Forum examined a striking set of connections between mathematics and gender in the nineteenth century British aristocracy, and also formed the basis for a recent presentation to OU's History of Science Colloquium. I am also the author of "In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1760-1860" (Rutgers, 1986). My new book,"Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in late Georgian Britain" was published in 2003 by Routledge. From 1988 to 1992, I directed the OU Women's Studies program.
Back to topRoberta Magnusson
Department of History
Medieval archeology (urban and monastic), medieval technology, history of hydraulic technology
Publications: Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and “The Technologies of Water in Medieval Italy,” in Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use, ed. Paolo Squatriti (Brill, 2000), 217-266, co-authored with Paolo Squatriti. Current research: I am working on a project on the origins of public services in medieval English towns.
Back to topTimothy S. Murphy
Department of English
Interdisciplinary studies of international cultural, political and scientific movements, 1900-present.
Professor Murphy is the author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (California, 1997) and the general editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, succeeding Ronald Schleifer. He is also an executive editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, which won the 1996 Best New Journal Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals; series editor of Angelaki Humanities, a book series from Manchester University Press; and English translation coordinator of the Deleuze Web (www.deleuze.fr.st/), an internet archive of seminar sessions given by the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He has published essays on Deleuze, Henri Bergson and quantum theory, Pierre Boulez and Ornette Coleman, James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche and other subjects related to modern and contemporary culture and theory, and he is currently drafting a book on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri. Professor Murphy teaches American literature (with special emphases on experimental writing, music and literature, and the contemporary novel), literary theory (especially Marxism and poststructuralism), literature and science, and science fiction.
Back to topSu Fang Ng
Department of English
Su Fang Ng studies early modern and postcolonial literatures. Her current
book project examines how seventeenth-century authors (including Milton,
Cavendish, Hobbes, and Quakers) appropriated and adapted the common
analogy between family and state to support radically different visions
of political community. In postcolonial studies, she focuses on Southeast
Asian responses to Japanese imperialism. She has published on Aemilia
Lanyer and early Stuart court patronage, the late medieval Bible translations
of the Wycliffites and Tyndale, and postcolonial nationalisms in ELH,
Studies in Philology, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and an
edited collection on postcolonial women writers (forthcoming from Africa
World Press). Her teaching interests include late-medieval literature,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, and postcolonial
Anglophone literature.
Donald J. Pisani
Merrick Chair of Western American History
Department of History
Donald J. Pisani, Merrick Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, focuses on the history of the use of natural resources in the United States, particularly water and land. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American Environmental History and the History of the American West. He is the author of From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (1984), To Reclaim a Divided West (1992), and Water, Land & Law in the West (1996), and Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935, published by the University of California Press.
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Robert A. Rundstrom
Department of GeographyCultural geography, ethnicity, American Indians/Inuit, Arctic, cartography
Publications: Introducing cultural and social cartography (Downsview, Ont.: University of Toronto Press 1993); “American Indian Placemaking on Alcatraz, 1969-71,” in You Are on Indian Land: Alcatraz Island, 1969-1971, ed. Troy R. Johnson (1994); “A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy,” Geographical Review 80(1990) 155-68. He serves on the editorial board of Journal of Cultural Geography.
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Ronald Schleifer
Department of EnglishForms of representation across the arts and sciences, 1880-1930.
Professor Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in the College of Medicine. From 1976 to 2000 he served as Editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture; and from 1986 to 1999 he served as co-editor of The Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, a series of books published by the University of Oklahoma Press. In 1999 he was the Director of the Annual Convention for the Society for Literature and Science, held in Norman. Presently, he is co-editor of Mariner 10: Cross-Disciplinary DVD ROMS, a series of electronic, interactive titles published by the University of Pennsylvania press, and serves as Graduate Director in the English Department. Professor Schleifer has written, translated, or edited fifteen books. The most recent include Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture 1880- 1930, (Cambridge, 2000), Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding of Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation (Michigan, 2000), and A Postmodern Bible Reader, co-edited with David Jobling and Tina Pippin (Blackwell, 2001). He is also co-editor of Contemporary Literary Criticism, now in its fourth edition (Longman, 1998). Professor Schleifer has authored more than sixty scholarly articles on literary modernism, critical theory, semiotics, science/medicine and literature, and the cultural study of music. His most recent article, “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry,” appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of New Literature History. Professor Schleifer teaches twentieth-century literature and literary and cultural theory at the undergraduate levels and courses on literature and medicine at the OU Health Sciences Center. He has also developed a seminar for scholarly writing for graduate students.
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Norman Stillman
Schusterman/Josey Chair in Judaic History
Department of HistoryJewish and Islamic History and Culture -- Medieval and Modern
Professor Stillman specializes in the social and cultural history of Islamic world and particularly its Jewish communities. He is the author of numerous books and articles in several languages including The Jews of Arab Lands, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, and Sephardic Religious Responses to Modernity. His research has included work on medieval pharmacology, modern folk medicine, and magic which have been published in his book The Language and Culture of the Jews of Sefrou, as well as in The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, The Journal of the American Oriental Society, and The Dictionary of the Middle Ages.
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Department Associates
Pamela Gossin
School of Arts and Humanities
University of Texas at DallasInterrelations of Literature, Science and Culture from the early modern period through twentieth century
My research and teaching interests center on the interrelations of Literature, Science and Culture from the early modern period through the twentieth century. My work directs critical attention to literary forms, tropes and rhetoric and the ways in which they illuminate cultural representations of scientific discoveries and the historical development of scientific concepts and ideas. I work on the popularization of science (astronomy, cosmology, space sciences) in diverse forms, including: professional popularizations, translations, biographies and autobiographies, literary representations of science and the use of scientific imagery in poetry and prose. I especially focus on interdisciplinary approaches to historical, literary and artistic representations of women in, and in relation to, science.
My publications include Encyclopedia of literature and science (Greenwood Press 2002); “Living Poetics, Enacting the Cosmos: Diane Ackerman's Popularization of Astronomy in The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral,” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26(1997) 605-638; “News on the Encyclopedia of Literature and Science,” Decodings 6.2(Spr 1997) 4-9; “‘All Danae to the Stars’: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos,” Victorian Studies 40.1(Aut 1996) 65-96; “Literature and Astronomy,” History of Astronomy: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. Lankford. NY: Garland, 1996, 307-314; “Literature and Science,” annotated bibliography, in Guide to Historical Literature, American Historical Association, Oxford University Press, 1994. A book manuscript, Beneath the Stars: A 'Literary' History of Astronomy, Women and Poetics, 1590-1990, is in progress.
Besides teaching literature and science and the history of science in an interdisciplinary, non-departmental setting at UTD, I serve as the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Science and the Arts (faculty in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Public Policy, Neuroscience and many others who share crossdisciplinary interests) and am a founding member of the Gender Studies Working Group, a joint effort of faculty and graduate students.
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Dennis Sepper
Department of Philosophy
University of DallasPhilosophy of science; early modern physics; Newton; Descartes; color theory
My book on imagination in Descartes was a prelude to a forthcoming volume on the shifting roles of imagination in science, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and aesthetics from 1600 to 1800. I am writing new essays on Descartes and revising old ones for a short book tentatively titled Rethinking Descartes. As part of this project I am examining the role Descartes plays in Heidegger’s various narratives of the history of philosophy. Two other projects are an essay on the symbolic-cultural and scientific importance of Einstein’s brain, and a consideration of German Idealism with a view to its implications for a political philosophy of science. I plan future work on the implications of cognitive science for understanding perception, imagination, and mind.
Recent publications include “Phenomenology” and “Mind-Body Problems,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by John L. Heilbron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 and “Prospero and the Times of Reading,” in Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context: Selected Essays for the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, edited by Bainard Cowan and Scott Lee. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002, 83-87.
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Kathleen Wellman
Department of History
Southern Methodist UniversityConnections between early modern culture and the natural sciences
My book, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Theophraste Renaudot, 1633-1642,was published in 2003 by the University of Oklahoma Press in their Science and Culture series. My current research is tentatively entitled Thinking through the Body: Physiology in the French Enlightenment, which will argue that the fundamental importance of physiological thinking to the development of the Enlightenment. Less relevant to the history of science, but pursuing my interest in French cultural history and women's history, I am also working on a study of queens and mistresses of the French renaissance.
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Elizabeth A. Williams
Department of History
Oklahoma State UniversityHistory of the medical, life, and social sciences in Europe, 1750-1900
The focus of my research and writing is the history of the medical, life, and social sciences in Europe (especially France and Britain) between 1750 and 1900. I am especially interested in the history of medicine, physiology, and anthropology. My 1994 book, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1994), explored the tradition of the medical "science of man" as it emerged from the Enlightenment and undergirded influential strains of medical and social science in the nineteenth century. My recently completed A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Ashgate, 2002) explores the impact of Montpellier vitalism on medicine in Enlightenment France. I am currently engaged in research in the history of mental medicine, with a special focus on hysteria and the gendering of mental pathologies. I have recently published articles on these themes in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Modern France, and the collection Reinventing Hippocrates (Ashgate, 2002).
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