Research

Princeton University Press, 2026

Few people today have heard of Johannes de Sacrobosco, yet his textbook was the most widely read astronomy book ever written. For five hundred years, from when it was first written in the Middle Ages to the dawn of the modern world, the Sphere introduced Europeans to the cosmos. The Book Everyone Read traces the unpredictable twists and turns of scientific knowledge and discovery through the stories of Sacrobosco’s readers—and in doing so, tells a new story of the emergence of modern science.

Kathleen Crowther shows how the secret to the Sphere’s longevity lay with its readers themselves, who chose which aspects of Sacrobosco’s original thirteenth-century text to accept, which to modify, and which to reject. Far from unchanging, editions of the book were accompanied by commentary, corrections, and details that challenged and revised the book’s original worldview of a finite, Earth-centered cosmos. Crowther introduces us to the university professors who peppered their lectures on the Sphere with tales of the exciting new discoveries made with telescopes and musings on the new Sun-centered model proposed by Copernicus, the navigators who found their way across the Atlantic using information about the stars they found in the book, the missionaries who brought translations of it to the Americas and Asia, and many others.

Through the surprising life of a medieval book of astronomy, The Book Everyone Read charts a scientific conversation that extended far beyond what we understood before.

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation.  Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live.  Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly “Darwinian.”  By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, "high modern" social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man.

In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing "organizational revolution" and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction.

These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in "the system." He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling.

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023

In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from pre-history to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology - such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage - to highlight the processes  and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history. In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures and underscores Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world.

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs for society, environment, and health—and in turn politicized them. Drawing on French government archives, engineers’ maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructures—streets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and rivers—in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies.

Routledge, 2021

Earthquakes have always been a deeply concerning phenomenon and therefore been the subject of much theorizing, both by scholars and laypeople. Although the cause of earthquakes remained a mystery until fairly recently, these earlier debates are a mirror of the changing scientific and religious views of the times, and especially of the volatile relation between the two. This is the first comprehensive study of the varying ideas on earthquakes in early modern Europe, covering the period from the late Middle Ages up to (but not including) the great earthquake of Lisbon of 1755.