The Goal of this Blog

My plan is to use this blog as something of a public journal of my thoughts on the history of science and related fields (e.g. STS, philosophy of science, science and politics, etc).  For me, the blog will be a kind of summer exercise: a way to avoid letting my shaky writing and critical thinking skills from atrophying completely over the summer.  Given the journal format, I won't promise completely polished posts, just sketches of different ideas--hopefully a few will actually be interesting.

To give you a sense of where my interests lie, here's a brief academic sketch.  I am currently fourth year undergraduate studying the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Like a lot of students who stumbled across the program, my interests are all over the place; my attraction to the field was partially based on the flexibility of the course-work--in the same semester I could study both Greek and Roman medicine alongside the history of classical physics.  Currently, my interests have narrowed slightly to two very different foci.  First, I am very interested in the history of biology and the related life sciences.  Reliving my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, great apes, and cave men has led me to hone in on the historical development of paleontology and anthropology.  I completed my capstone research paper on the challenges of making museum displays about human evolution encountered by anthropologists and artists at the Chicago Field Museum in the 1930s (more on that later?).  At the same time, I find myself equally drawn to the history of medieval science.  Part of this fascination comes from how unsung the medieval period remains.  There is so much wide-open territory to explore: the development of natural philosophy at medieval universities, the transmission and appropriation of ancient Greek science by Islamic civilization, the interaction between science and the Church, etc.  The more you dig, the more the middle ages deserve study as a time of intellectual achievement on par with the Renaissance or Enlightenment.  While these interests currently provide some guidance to my coursework and reading, my blog will probably go beyond them.  Anything related to the cross-section of science and the humanities will be fair game.