Heather E. Douglas is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She received her PhD from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998 and has held tenure-line positions since then at the University of Puget Sound, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, as well as numerous articles on values in science, the moral responsibilities of scientists, and the role of science in democratic societies. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation,…

Ilja Nieuwland is the author of American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus. He is a historian of science–in particular paleontology–attached to the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. American Dinosaur Abroad covers the discovery in 1899 of the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—by a team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie. Then the longest and largest dinosaur on record, the Diplodocus skeleton was replicated into plaster casts that were gifted to different nations by Carnegie in the years leading up to World War I. In this largely untold history, Nieuwland…

Soviet Space Mythologies Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity Slava Gerovitch HISTORY OF SCIENCE/RUSSIAN STUDIES “Soviet Space Mythologies makes a major contribution to the history of Soviet space flight and culture. It places the story of Russian space conquest into the broader history of space flight—including references to pioneering scholars in the history of NASA. This is also the first book to focus on the professional identity of the cosmonaut and space engineer.” —Andrew Jenks, California State University, Long Beach Slava Gerovitch explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and…

Donna Drucker’s book, The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge is featured in Times Literary Supplement (TLS). (Un)natural Sex By Ivan Crozier | March 18, 2015 Featured on The Times Literary Supplement Kinsey’s life has become more widely known since the publication of a biography by James Jones (1997), and, in 2004, the novel The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle as well as a biopic starring Liam Neeson. Having completed his doctorate on gall wasps, Kinsey found himself in charge of a sexual education class for married students at Indiana University. A lack of sound information led…