overview
I study the cultural history of American science, from its formative moments in the early nineteenth century to the dynamics that have played out across the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in how tensions over the politics of scientific knowledge in a democratic society have had significant effects on the who, what, where, when, and why of the scientific enterprise, and on the ways in which diverse visions of scientific Americanism have circulated throughout the "intellectual commons" of vernacular culture.

With this emphasis on science, the public, and popular culture, my work necessarily reaches out across disciplines, drawing on American History and American Studies, sociology, literature, philosophy, visual culture, and gender studies, as well as the history of science and the history of technology.
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popular culture/natural history:
science in the american vernacular
I’m currently drafting a manuscript with the working title: Science in the American Vernacular: Improvisations in Natural History across the 20^th-Century. In this project, I argue that values, methods, models, and goals drawn from the traditions of natural history have served as important sources for critiquing the abstractionist and reductionist norms that came to define "the scientific method" with the rise of laboratory experimentalism and quantitative techniques in twentieth-century America. This naturalist-based critique inspired innovative forms of scientific investigation from biological, anthropological, psychological, and sociological perspectives, along with a proliferation of counter-narratives within the vernacular sphere from literary figures, journalists, artists, dramatists, and filmmakers. This work is supported by an NSF Investigator Grant.

The book starts at the turn of the century by looking at the images conveyed in the popular press of the California horticulturist, Luther Burbank, who was world-famous during his lifetime and yet is little-remembered today. At a time when scientific professionals were withdrawing from the public sphere into restricted domains, discussions about Burbank in the popular press helped to flesh out an alternative image of what I characterize as "the intimate scientist." This image was a counter-response to attempts to separate professionals from the public, to privilege laboratory knowledge over experiential knowledge, and to an incipient scientism that was pushing humanistic perspectives aside to the point that a "two cultures" divide could become normative.

This vernacular discourse is one that intersected as well with a more sophisticated and technical version that was being developed in this same period by the psychologist and philosopher William James, in his arguments about the need for a "radical empiricism" that could acknowledge the reality of "a pluralistic universe." The idea of the intimate scientist and its circulation within naturalist-informed discourse --  as articulated in the Burbank stories and as adapted toward their own ends by the other figures I study in this book -- created a powerful set of alternative narratives to dominant views of scientific culture that still resonate today.

The core of the book consists of three sections of two chapters each that pair figures who are differently situated in relation to academic science – one as a fully-credentialed member of the guild, one working from a different position – to help visualize more fully how science in the vernacular opens up possibilities for knowledge creation when it happens both in relation to professional boundaries and in public venues. These are:

1) noted University of California biologist William Emerson Ritter; and Edward Ricketts, who owned a biological supply company in Monterey (and who teamed up with author John Steinbeck to write an ecological study, Sea of Cortez (1941), and who appeared as a character in such works of Steinbeck’s as Cannery Row);

2) pioneering ecological psychologist Roger Barker, of the University of Kansas; and William H. Whyte, a business journalist from Fortune magazine, who produced a sociological best-seller, The Organization Man (1956), and who later became an expert on urban planning; and

 3) renowned Columbia University anthropologist Ruth Benedict; and Rachel Carson, a biology-trained writer who became chief editor of publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and who then gained fame as the award-winning author of such influential works as The Sea Around Us (1951) and Silent Spring (1962).

In a concluding chapter, I consider how the terms of the genre begun at the turn of the 20^th century in the popular press in depictions of Burbank as an intimate scientist – and the permutations in this discourse that emerged over later decades in the efforts of the six other figures I discuss – were renewed in the American context in the 1960s for the visual age of popular film and television, by examining treatments of the life of Robert Stroud (known as "the Birdman of Alcatraz") and primatologist Jane Goodall, in her association with National Geographic.

for more, see:
(with Karen Rader) "Science in the Everyday World: Why Perspectives in the History of Science Matter," Isis, 2008, 99:35-364. || online

 "Knowledge Held in Common: Tales of Luther Burbank and Science in the American Vernacular," Isis, 2001, 92:484-516 || abstract
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popular science in the antebellum era / children's literature
What does it mean to be a scientific American? My work to date has focused on what kinds of answers were given to this question by twentieth-century Americans, stretching back to critiques of increasingly restrictionist visions of the scientific enterprise enunciated by the psychologist and philosopher William James at the turn-of-the-20th-century (see past research and work on vernacular science). In a more recent project underway, I search back for the roots of debates over radically empiricist views of nature as they emerged earlier in the nineteenth century, among the generation who inherited the Revolution and who came of age in the 1820s, when widespread popular interest in science and nature became part of a broadly-shared public culture.

I have a long-standing interest in the history of childhood and in children’s literature, going back to my master’s thesis in developmental psychology at Cornell University under historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, in which I used popular books for girls to analyze and compare cultural values about female adolescence in the progressive and cold war eras, and to consider to what extent lay theories and scientific theories about adolescent girlhood were related to each other. More recently, my work on Luther Burbank entailed looking at children’s stories about the famous scientist as well. It is also the case that much of the graduate research I have supervised has related to the history of childhood and/or children’s literature.

for more, see:
 "Popular Science in National and Transnational Perspective: Suggestions from the American Context," Isis (forthcoming June 2009)

"The Children’s Republic of Science in the Antebellum Literature of Samuel Griswold Goodrich and Jacob Abbott," Osiris, 2009, vol. 24 (forthcoming) [special volume on "Science and National Identity"]
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digital history/public history
I first became interested in working on digital projects as a way to supplement my course on science and popular culture, given the lack of teaching materials that existed. But as I worked toward creating what I conceived of as a "web-enhanced" or "hybrid" course, I became convinced that thinking in terms of university coursework was just a jumping-off point for realizing that digital projects offer opportunities to reach audiences beyond the university’s walls, particularly in terms of moving toward an ethic that stresses the concept of engaging with members of the public as participants in the process of creating and debating meanings about history, science, and culture.

Through the projects described below, my goal is to make the process of historical research transparent to a public audience and to provide participatory vehicles, by creating content and curating materials that allow anyone engaged in life-long learning to have access to quality contextual information, relevant source materials, and a multiplicity of perspectives. As Edward Ayers has suggested about the possible ramifications of digital archives for the doing of history, such new formats "may create pressures toward, temptations toward, narratives that try to keep more facets of experience and perception in play. We might be able to imagine ways to write that let us deal more effectively with multiple sequences, multiple voices, multiple outcomes, multiple implications." I can't think of a better reason to do history, and the new tools of digital media deserve exploration, even if the academy isn't set up to support such ventures in the daily rounds of a professor's work life.

on-going digital projects
science and popular culture webfolio
"Scipop" will be part archive, and part research lab. . . part scrapbook, and part study guide. . . part explanation, investigation, and conversation. There are four main topic areas: scientific images; childhood and science; nature and culture; and science fiction.

scipop blog: petri dish
This academic weblog follows topics and issues raised in the "Science and Popular Culture" course more or less closely when it is in session, and ranges somewhat more broadly at other times. The weblog – "petri dish: labnotes on science, culture, and history" - is an experiment in "making history" in public, by discussing teaching about science and popular culture, by sharing bits of work-in-progress, by working out reflections about that research in public, and by encouraging follow-up by those interested in the items discussed in the entries through providing links to related topics. It is also an experiment in starting a book from scratch using new media as the inspiration for rethinking the nature, structure, presentation, and content of a future book on science and popular culture in the American context.

for more, see:
"What Have We To Do With Mr. Everyman, or He With Us?" Reflections on Professionalism, the Public, and the Digital Age || Invited Plenary Address on: "The Public Presentation of Science and Technology," for the Joint Meeting of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, November 2005 || online

History 3500:  "The Future of the Past: History in the Digital Age" || online
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past research:
psychologists, scientific authority, and cultural politics
In past research I have studied the interplay between politics and science, particularly within psychology and the social sciences among a generation of scientists who came of age in the 1920s and who were influenced by the radical empiricism of psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), and its fit with research models drawn from natural history. In their work, these psychologists pushed back against emerging professional norms that exalted data drawn from the laboratory over the study of how people experience the everyday world, and they argued that over-reliance on research models cast in the mold of classical physics resulted in minutely-detailed studies that focused on "science for science’s sake," rather than advancing ways to realize a "science for society’s sake."

The psychologists who are the chief focus of the book – Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists’ Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America – are Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay, and the chapters focus on their arguments for the validity of the concept of "individuality" and subjective experience, and the need to develop research tools that could handle the complexity of "the- individual-in-social-context." The critiques they mounted inside science had strong resonances with other ongoing debates in American society, such as New Deal politics, the Protestant Social Gospel, the documentary movement in the arts, controversy over the place of immigrants as "real" Americans, radio as a mass medium, and public debates over the validity of statistics to represent reality.

As important as radically empiricist challenges were for debates within American psychology over research methods and scientific values, the issues I highlight in this book were just one aspect of a wider, diverse set of episodes that emerged over the course of the 20^th century. I tackle this larger tradition of radically empiricist research in my work-in-progress on natural history discourse and science in the American vernacular.

for more, see:
Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists’ Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America (Cambridge U Pr, 1997).  ||  info from google books

for psychology, technology, and culture see:
"‘Mapping the New Mental World Created by Radio’: Media Messages, Cultural Politics, and Cantril & Allport’s The Psychology of Radio," Journal of Social Issues, 1998, 54:7-27 || online

"Redesigning the Engineering Mind: The Arcturus IV Science Fiction Project at Mid-Century MIT," Science, Technology & Society Curriculum Newsletter, Spring 2006:1-7 || online (go to page 2)