Doing History of Science

Alix Hui

Alexandra Hui is currently a visiting researcher on as a Safe Place for Science Fellow at the University of Toulouse. From 2008-2026 she taught history of science and German history at Mississippi State University. From 2019-2024, she co-edited the History of Science Society publications, including the journal Isis. Her scholarly articles, anthology chapters, and monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2012), explore the relationship between science, sound, and music. She has also co-edited Testing Hearing: the Making of Modern Aurality (OUP, 2020) and the 2013 Osiris volume on music, sound, and the laboratory. Hui has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In November of 2026, MIT Press will publish her co-edited (with Emily Pawley) A Historian’s Handbook for Saving the World: Responding to the Global Climate Emergency, a series of essays, interviews, and resources to inspire and equip humanists to intervene in global climate change. Hui has just completed her second scholarly monograph, Surround Sounds: The Science of Background Music, on the co-development of new forms of listening and background music technology in twentieth-century America. She currently working how field scientists, ranging from ornithologists to hunters to foresters to wetlands managers, listen to the environment and the way in which this listening contributes to the formation of what Hui terms "imagined ecologies."

Judy Kaplan

Judy Kaplan is a cultural and intellectual historian of the human sciences with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistic research. She has published widely on subjects from orientalism to sound studies and is currently working on a project that unravels histories of research on language universals. She was a NSF Fellow in Residence at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and is currently a Public Historian at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, PA.

Claire Sabel

Claire Conklin Sabel is a historian of early modern earth sciences, extractive industries, and empire, with expertise in Dutch and British empires in Southeast Asia. Her research explores how knowledge about the earth and environment were shaped by the growth of European imperialism and overseas trade in the Indian Ocean. She received her PhD in History of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project SCARCE, and is affiliated with the Key Research Area in History of Science. This project aims to produce a critical history of natural resource management, focusing on Central Europe in a global perspective.

She is currently working on her first book in progress, Rare Earth: Gemstones, Geohistory, and Commercial Geography c. 1600-1750, and is developing a second project on gendered expertise in early modern mining, “Expanded Horizons: Women and the Making of Natural Resources in the Early Modern World.