Notes on the Contributors
Catherine Denys
is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Lille. She has been director of the Institut de Recherche Historique du Septentrion, vice-president of the scientific board and director of Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. A specialist of the history of eighteenth-century police, she has studied security in the cities of northern France and Belgium and is currently working on the colonial police of the Old Regime.
Hannah Elmer
is currently a post-doctoral researcher in early modern history at the Historisches Seminar at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. She received her PhD in 2019 from Columbia University. Her research interests include later medieval and early modern cultural, religious, and intellectual history, and she focuses especially on Central Europe. She is currently working on a monograph that investigates interactions of supernatural, natural, and human agency in problems of miraculous reanimation in the late fifteenth century.
Liliane Hilaire-Pérez
is professor of modern history at the University of Paris (laboratoire ICT-Les Europes dans le Monde), director of studies at EHESS (Centre Alexandre-Koyré) and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her books include L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris: 2000) and La pièce et le geste. Artisans, marchands et savoir technique à Londres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 2013). She co-edited with Catherine Lanoë Les sciences et les techniques, laboratoire de l’histoire. Hommage à Patrice Bret (Paris: 2022), and is preparing the publication, with Guillaume Carnino and Jérôme Lamy, of Global History of Techniques (19th–21st c.) (Turnhout: 2024). She is an editor of the journal Artefact. Techniques, histoire et sciences humaines, and the co-director of the Groupement de recherche 2092 TPH-“Techniques et production dans l’histoire”.
Olivier Jandot
holds the Agrégation and a PhD in History from the University of Lyon. He teaches in literary preparatory classes for Grandes Écoles (Lycée Notre-Dame de la paix, Lille), at Sciences Po Lille and at the Université d’Artois, where he is associate fellow at the history research centre (UR 4027 CREHS, Arras, France). His research focuses on the intersection between the history of material culture, the history of the body and the history of sensibilities, especially in the domain of thermal comfort. He is the author of Les délices du feu: l’homme, le chaud et le froid à l’époque moderne (Ceyzérieu: 2017).
Cyril Lacheze
is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (FEMTO-ST/RECITS). He defended his PhD thesis in 2020, within the history of techniques team of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary History at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where he was Temporary Teaching and Research Assistant (ATER). He devotes his research to technical systems of the early modern era, starting with architectural terracotta production, using both historical and archaeological sources. He seeks in particular to reconstitute via a systemic approach dynamic of everyday technical productions, intrinsically linked to each other within a given socio-geographical space. He is the author of L’art du briquetier, XVIe–XIXe siècle. Du régime de la pratique aux régimes de la technique (Paris: 2023).
Andrew M.A. Morris
recently completed his PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research is funded by the FWO – Research Foundation Flanders, grant number 148531. His dissertation explores eighteenth-century English engineer John Smeaton’s methods as an instrument maker, experimental philosopher and engineer, covering Smeaton’s early electrical experiments, trials on model waterwheels and windmills, and his design for an air pump and innovative pressure gauge. The dissertation focuses, in particular, on the interactions between these different practices in Smeaton’s work, and how these interactions might throw new light on the science-technology distinction.
Cornelia Müller
is a research associate and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences of Zittau/Görlitz, Faculty of Social Science. Her dissertation is supervised by Susanne Rau (University of Erfurt) and Raj Kollmorgen (University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz). After an MA degree in Early Modern and Modern History, Political Science and Saxonian regional History at the University of Dresden in 2002, she worked for several educational institutions in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. She was president of the German Korczak Association (2012–2015) and member of the Board of the International Korczak Association (2011–2019). Since 2013, she is Member of the General Management of the Landesverein Sächsischer Heimatschutz (Saxony Heritage Protection Association).
Bérengère Pinaud
is a PhD candidate at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and affiliated to the Centre Alexandre-Koyré. By undertaking a material and social history of science, her thesis dissertation focuses on material culture in the apothecaries’ daily practice in eighteenth-century Paris. She examines the logistics and supply of the trade, the spaces of remedy making and knowledge transmission, and the shop as a social space through its arrangement, in order to shed new light on apothecaries as medical artisans, whose knowledge was at the crossroads of natural history, chemistry, artisanship, and commerce.
Stefano Salvia
PhD, is a research assistant in History of Science at the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa. Currently, he is also high-school teacher of Philosophy and History in Turin and a scientific collaborator at the Museo Galileo – Institute and Museum of History of Science, Florence. Former member of the International Research Network History of Scientific Objects, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, he was granted a Lerici Scholarship and a visiting fellowship at the Center for History of Science of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research interests range from early modern natural philosophy to history of modern physics, from historiography of science to historical epistemology and STS-oriented museology. He is co-editor and contributor of the volume Scienza e filosofia della complessità (Rome: 2020).
Marie Thébaud-Sorger
is a tenured research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2014, based at the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CNRS/EHESS/MNHN) in Paris, and an associate of the Maison française in Oxford where she ran the History of Science programme (2017–2020). She has been Marie Curie Fellow (2008–2010) at Warwick University, visiting fellow at the MPIWG (2016) and associate member at the History faculty of Oxford university (2019–2021). Her research seeks to explore the entanglement between materialities and mediations, the culture of the “arts”, technical improvements and inventive practices in Eighteenth century Europe especially focusing on fire and stale air management. She is also currently Co-PI of the ANR FabLight The making of light in the visual arts during the Enlightenment (2022–2026). She published extensively on the reception of the lighter-than-air machines in French and European societies, L’aérostation au temps des Lumières (Rennes: 2009), and co-edited with Liliane Hilaire-Perez and Fabien Simon, L’Europe des sciences et des techniques. Un dialogue des savoirs XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: 2016).
Simon Werrett
is Professor of the History of Science in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at University College London. He joined UCL after ten years in the Department of History at the University of Washington. His work explores the history of science and various arts, spectacular, domestic, and navigational. He is the author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: 2010) and Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment (Chicago: 2019), and edited, with Lissa Roberts, Compound Histories: Materials, Governance, and Production, 1760–1840 (Leiden: 2017).