Silke Ackermann
studied History, Languages and Cultures of the Orient, and History of Science at Frankfurt University (Germany). She worked for sixteen years in a variety of curatorial and managerial roles at the British Museum before taking up the Directorship of the Oxford University Museum of the History of Science following a two-year stint at a German University between these two roles. She served as President of the Scientific Instrument Commission of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science until 2017.
Marisa Addomine
is an independent researcher in the history of mechanical horology. Mainly interested in public clocks and early clock-making, in 2004 she discovered a clock in Chioggia which she could date to 1386. She is currently collaborating with Italian and foreign universities and museums, and has been invited to speak at the British Horological Institute and the International Medieval Congress, Leeds.
Jim Bennett
is Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, London. He was formerly Director of the Museum of the History of Science and Professor of the History of Science in the University of Oxford. He is a previous President of the Scientific Instrument Commission.
Marvin Bolt
is Curator of Science and Technology at the Corning Museum of Glass. He investigates seventeenth-century refracting telescopes and other optical devices, the role of glass in scientific instruments, and connections between art, science and the humanities.
Louise E. Devoy
is Curator of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and has worked in the museum sector for over ten years. She originally studied Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Leicester and later pursued studies in the history of science and museums at Imperial College London. She has since worked at the Science Museum and British Museum, where she discovered an interest in astronomical instruments of the early modern period, which inspired the research featured in this publication.
Richard Dunn
is Senior Curator for the History of Science at Royal Museums Greenwich. His publications include The Telescope: A Short History (2009), Finding Longitude (2014, with Rebekah Higgitt) and Navigational Instruments (2016).
Seb Falk
is a fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. He researches late-medieval sciences, especially in religious contexts.
Stephen Johnston
received his BA and PhD from Cambridge University and was a curator at the Science Museum, London from 1987 to 1995. He joined the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford in 1995 and is now Head of Research, Teaching and Collections there. His publications have focused on practical mathematics from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and he has curated exhibitions on a broad range of themes within the history of science.
Richard L. Kremer
teaches history of science at Dartmouth College (USA), where he also curates that institution’s King Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments. He has published many articles on medieval and early modern astronomical instruments and on the astronomical content of early printed almanacs and calendars. He co-edited Instruments on Display (Brill, 2014), volume 4 of the Scientific Instruments and Collections series, and currently serves as President of the Scientific Instrument Commission.
Günther Oestmann
trained as a clockmaker. He received a PhD with a study on the astronomical clock of Strasbourg Cathedral in 1992, and in 2001 completed a postdoctoral thesis on Heinrich Rantzau and his attitude towards astrology. He was a lecturer at the Technische Unversität Berlin from 2010 before being appointed as extraordinary professor for the history of science in 2017. In 2013 the Musée international d’horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds awarded him the “Prix Gaïa”.
Josefina Rodríguez-Arribas
has research experience in the history of medieval science, Hebrew language and divinatory practices. Since 2009 she has focused on the relations between the textual and material scientific cultures of Jews, notably the cultural role of astrolabes among Jews in Europe and the Near East. She has published on medieval astronomy and astrology and has been a Fellow at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Michigan, the University of London and the University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg.
Petra G. Schmidl
studied history, history of science and ethnology, and Arabic including supplementary studies in physics, Latin, Hebrew and Persian. She received her doctoral degree from Frankfurt University in 2005 for work on three folk astronomical treatises from eleventh-century Hijaz and thirteenth-century Yemen. Her main research interests lie in the field of pre-modern astronomy and astrology in Islamicate societies, and astronomical instruments, mainly the astrolabe.
Giorgio Strano
PhD, is curator of the collections at the Museo Galileo: Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. He is involved in the study and popularization of the history of mathematical astronomy. He has published articles in Italian and international journals and has collaborated on the creation of exhibitions on the history of astronomy and science.
Sylvia Sumira
is an independent conservator specializing in globes. After qualifying in paper conservation, she held a Leverhulme studentship in globe conservation at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for several years before setting up her own studio. An accredited member of the UK Institute of Conservation, her clients have included museums, libraries and other institutions in Britain and abroad. Her book The Art and History of Globes was published by the British Library in 2014.