Nicholas Dew (DPhil, Oxford) is an Associate Professor in the History Department at McGill University, where he teaches early modern history and history of science. Before coming to McGill in 2004 he held post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge, and in Paris. His work is on France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the interaction between the sciences and early colonialism. He is the author of Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford University Press, 2009), and the co-editor, with James Delbourgo, of Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, 2008). He is currently working on a book on the circum-Atlantic dimensions of French science in the period c. 1650-1760. He is a founder member of the French Atlantic History Group in Montreal, and in recent years has run the McGill History and Philosophy of Science program and speaker series.
Richard Spiegel
McGill Node MA student in History, received his BA from McGill in History and the History of Art. His areas of interest include scientific modeling, fiction in science, historical epistemology, the history of the exact science, the visual culture of science, the philosophy of art, film and film making in an academic context. He is currently preparing a major research paper, “Alternatives to the Retinal Image: Musical Analogies of Sight and the Figuration of Vision in Late 17th-Century Science and Art.” This works holds that anatomical science looking at the visual system proposed a number of alternative metaphors for thinking about vision.
Anna Dysert
As a Cluster PhD, Anna Dysert is assisting with the Node's organizational and networking tasks. She is working towards her PhD in History under the supervision of Dr. Faith Wallis. Her MA is from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her areas of interest include manuscript studies and book history, medieval medicine and science, and digital humanities. The topic of her dissertation is the dissemination of new medical knowledge within Europe during the long 12th century. Her research concentrates on a body of medical texts written by a 9th century physician known as Isaac Israeli, translated into Latin in the 1080s. By reconstructing their reception and transmission through manuscript evidence, she hopes to contribute to the reevaluation of our assumptions about 12th century medicine and Salernitan medical tradition.
Margaret Carlyle is a doctoral candidate in the History Dept. and has been assisting with the Node's organizational and networking tasks. Research Interests
Gabriella Coleman
Department of Art History & Communication Studies