jhiorg

This is Part I of a twentieth-anniversary retrospective on Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. An interview with Sinha will be published next Wednesday as Part II.

Susan Pedersen writes,

by Kapp Singer

There’s a Yiddish saying about the futility of counterfactuals: “If grandma had wheels, she would be a wagon.” A historian of science in the 1990s might not have gotten the joke. Scholars at the time developed a peculiar habit of referring to organisms as technologies. Soon, the field teemed with fly technologies (

by Rae Bruml Norton

Nathan Schlanger is Professor of Archaeology at École nationale des chartes, Paris. His research concerns the history and politics of material culture and archaeology. He has edited or coedited several volumes, including Marcel Mauss: Tec...

Intellectual history and the history of science share common roots, having made a hard split only in the 1970s and 1980s, when the latter largely redefined itself around sociologies of science and especially studies of laboratory practice. In the meantime, i...

by Disha Karnad Jani

On this episode of the In Theory podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Mélanie Lamotte about her recent book By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (2026). Lamotte’s work presents a globe...