Contributing Editors

The contributing editor positions for the Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science was established in 2017. Providing professional service to the discipline, contributing editors help collect resources in an area of their specialization (see the full list here). Areas range from specific languages to topic areas to types of documents such as dissertations. Contributing Editors are asked to serve for a two-year term, which is renewable, and agree to devote several hours each month to collecting material for the bibliography. Please contact the Bibliographer if you are interested in contributing.

Eleonora Andriani (Astronomy, Astrology, Magic and Divination in the MIddle Ages; current term 2023-2024)

Eleonora Andriani is an international Doctor in medieval philosophy (Università del Salento – Universität zu Köln) and a member of ‘CETEFIL: Centro per l’edizione di testi filosofici medievali e rinascimentali’. She was Occasional Student at the Warburg Institute of the University of London (2016 – 2018) and research assistant at the Thomas-Institut der Universität zu Köln (2015 – 2016) in the project Maimonides Latinus. In Cologne she received an academic training by ‘a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne’ having the opportunity to develop a doctoral dissertation project (2015 – 2016). From September 2020 to November 2022 she was post-doctoral researcher at the Paris Observatory, where she worked on the history of Alfonsine astronomy in Europe as a team member of the project ALFA (an ERC funded project; principal Investigator: Dr Matthieu Husson). Since December 01/2022, she is at the IRHT (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes) in Paris as a team member of the SourcEncyMe (Sources des encyclopédies médiévales) project directed by Isabelle Draelants. Morevover, she is currently working on the publication of the critical edition of the Prohemium of the Liber introductorius of Michael Scot, in which her doctoral thesis mainly consists. Her areas of research interests are: History of Medieval Astronomy, Astrology, Magic and Divination.

Jonathon Erlen (Dissertations in the History of Science; since 2003)

Jonathon Erlen is a PhD in History and teaches courses in the history of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and through the History Department/Honors College at that institution. His research interests focus on recent doctoral dissertations in the broad scope of the medical humanities. He oversees the lecture series sponsored by the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society.

Anthony Greco (The Middle East and North Africa; current term 2023-24)

Anthony Greco is a PhD candidate specializing in modern Middle East history. His dissertation “Flows of History: Science, Colonialism, and the Cairo Nilometer, 1700-1920” traces the history of the Nile flood and the hydraulic knowledge production and engineering which made it increasingly legible, governable, and profitable from the early-eighteenth to twentieth century. It complicates how we understand the relationship between science and empire by exploring the complex rather than unidirectional relationship between European and Arabic, Ottoman, and Sudanese discourses and practices of Nile management. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Consortium for the History of Science, and the Regents of the University of California Santa Barbara.

Thomas Horst (Cosmography: Maps, Atlases, Globes, Instruments and Texts; since 2018, current term 2023-2024)

Thomas Horst studied History and Anthropology at the Universities of Munich and Vienna. In 2003 and 2005 he carried out twice an ethnological field research on the descendants of the Mundurukú-Indians in the Amazon region (Brazil). After his PhD in 2008 (on the development of manuscript maps of Bavaria as sources for the history of climatology) he specialized in the analysis of old globes and won the prestigious Fiorini-Haardt-Prize of the International Coronelli-Society for the Study of Globes in 2010. His book about Gerhard Mercator as a cartographer (2011), translated into French and Dutch, has been distinguished by the Société de Geographie with a special award in Paris in 2012.

Thomas was based at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), University of Lisbon, where he acted as a Postdoc Researcher (with contract) on the history of cosmography and cartography (globes, maps and texts) and their transcultural relations during the period of the first globalization at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences (FCUL, 2019-2023). His main areas of interest include the history of early modern cosmography, climate history, the history of discoveries, German-Portuguese relations, transfer of cartographic knowledge as well as cultural history, anthropology and historical visual culture. He is currently working as a map librarian at the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Thomas is also Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Geodesy of the Bundeswehr University in Munich, where he gives courses regularly (as well as at the Historical Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich). From October 2017 to February 2018 he was Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG in Berlin.

He also is Editor of the Review Section for Imago Mundi, the International Journal for the History of Cartography (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rimu20/current), Extended Board Member of “the International Coronelli-Society for the Study of Globes” (Vienna, http://www.coronelli.org/gesellschaft/vorstand_e.html) and Co-Initiator of PORT-AL-HIST, the International Academical Network for the Research about German-Portuguese History (https://port-al-hist.jimdofree.com/).

Judy Kaplan (Language Sciences; current term 2023-24)

Zeynep Kuleli Karasahan (Turkish Language Sources; current term 2023-24)

Francesco Luzzini (Italian Language Sources; since 2017, current term 2022-2023)

Francesco Luzzini (PhD, History of Science; BS/MS, Natural Sciences) is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Dept. of Philosophy) and Johns Hopkins University (Dept. of History of Science). His work focuses on the Earth and environmental sciences, natural philosophy, and medicine in early modern Europe, with important forays into modern and contemporary contexts. His current project SOUNDEPTH aims to understand how the debate on mineral generation in early modern Europe influenced the development of natural philosophy, the Earth sciences, and the role of humans as geological and environmental agents.

Francesco is also Affiliate Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Dept. I). He is member of the Nominating Committee of the History of Earth Sciences Society (HESS) and Co-editor (History of Science) of the journal Il Protagora. Among his previous positions, he was Mellon Fellow (2020) and Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016) at the University of Oklahoma, Visiting Fellow (2016) at MPIWG Berlin, and Research Fellow (2012, 2014) at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. He taught history of biology, history of geology, and history of medicine at the Universities of Milan and East Piedmont.

Sophie Serra (French Language Sources; current term 2022-23)

Sophie Serra currently is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Project ALFA, lead by Matthieu Husson and hosted by the CNRS at the Paris Observatory-PSL. Within this project, she is working on the late 13^th century and first generation 14^th century Parisian astronomers, previous to the wide adoption of Alfonsine Astronomy across Europe, with a history of science, history of institutions and history of philosophy approach. She received her PhD in History of Philosophy from Paris Sorbonne Université in 2015 with a dissertation on an joint interpretation of Nicole Oresme’s intellectual and political projects throughout his career. And she also is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) where she graduated in 2010. She held various research and teaching positions in Medieval Philosophy and History of Science in several European institutions, cultivating her interest for both these fields she has a French CNU qualification for. Her research focuses on 13^th and 14^th century Latin and French Medieval Natural Philosophy, with a special interest for its meeting points with the Quadrivium, and the circulation of scientific knowledge during the Middle Ages. She is currently developing her research along an axis that deals with the notions of errors and corrections in Medieval sciences. She also is an associate researcher at SPHere (UMR 7219), a member of the European Society for the History of Science (EHSH), the Société Internationale pour l’Etude de la Philosophie Médiévale (SIEPM). She manages the website Pariscope Médiéval devoted to news announcements and Paris academic life in the Medieval Philosophy field, and she is special editor for French language source for the Isis CB.

Chaokang Tai (Dutch Language Sources; term 2022-2024)

Chaokang Tai is a historian of modern astronomy and photography currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg in the DFG-funded project “Astronomy’s Glass Archive: Photographic Practices at the Observatory, 1850-1950”, headed by Omar Nasim. His research focuses on the material practices of astrophotography in Dutch astronomy during the first half of the twentieth century and the global networks created by the Dutch observatories to obtain photographic plates. During his PhD (University of Amsterdam, 2021), Chaokang explored the transformation of early-twentieth-century astronomy and its relations to political developments through the work of Dutch astronomer and Marxist Anton Pannekoek. He is a guest researcher at Leiden Observatory and an external member of the Vossisus Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences (University of Amsterdam) and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (Utrecht University).

Luís Tirapicos (Portuguese Language Sources and Archaeoastronomy; since 2018, current term: 2023-2024)

Luís Tirapicos studied astronomy at the University of Porto and History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon (MA, 2010; PhD, 2017). He is a researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His main research interests are the history of astronomy in Portugal, Jesuit science, Iberian archaeoastronomy, and the material culture of science. In early 2010 he was a research intern in the History of Science and Technology at the Royal Observatory–National Maritime Museum (Greenwich); and in the fall of 2013, a Resident Fellow of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City (MO). Between 2010 and 2012 he held a BGCT fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon, which has since become part of the National Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC/Museums of the University of Lisbon). As one of the authors of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, 2014), edited by Thomas Hockey, he was a recipient of the 2017 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy, awarded by the American Astronomical Society.

Helge Wendt (German Language Sources; since 2017-2019, 2020-2021)

Helge Wendt is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is associated with the project “Globalization of Knowledge.” He received his PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2009, where he taught early modern history. His research focuses on the global history of coal, the history of Christian missions in different colonial contexts and the history and historiography of globalization. He currently works on the global history of knowledge of black coal (18th and 19th centuries). Wendt published a book on the global history of colonial missions Die missionarische Gesellschaft. Mikrostrukturen einer kolonialen Globalisierung (Franz Steiner, 2011) and papers on different aspects of history of colonial mission, global history of coal and history of science. He is co-editor of The History of Physics in Cuba (Springer, 2014) and editor of The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World (1500–1900) (Edition Open Access, 2016).

Past Contributing Editors

Douwe Schipper (Dutch Language Sources; term 2018-2022)
Didi van Trijp (Dutch language sources; 2017-2018)