This group provides a unique forum for historians of science to discuss the challenges and responsibilities of being a historian of science in the world today. It provides a safe, structured, and tolerant environment for members to talk about the history of academic freedom in relation to current attacks on STEM and Higher Education. A primary purpose of the group is to develop skills and capacity for protecting that freedom in a historically informed and self-reflexive way. Our goal is to produce a documentary record of the field as it is under pressure and evolving in front of our eyes. We hope that this orientation will coordinate action in the present and will also create a resource that future historians can meaningfully engage.
Group Conveners
Alix Hui
Alexandra Hui is a historian of science and modern Germany at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of science, sound, and changing conceptions of the environment, from background music to birding culture. She teaches undergraduate and graduate students in modern European history, history of science, sensory history, and environmental history. Hui has spent her entire academic career at large, public research universities but draws on her own undergraduate education at a small, liberal arts college to encourage a free, discussion-based exchange of ideas. In her current position at a land-grant university in the Southeast, from introductory survey courses to PhD research seminars, she emphasizes the practice of history, asking how – and why – we know what we know. Hui co-organized several summer workshops for local k-12 teachers to help increase the social science content in their curriculum. This experience prompted her to think in a more holistic way about the what skills and interests students do and do not bring with them to college-level history coursework and has motivated her help her students to better integrate their interest in history as well as the skills of historical analysis into their everyday lives.
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.