Works and works in progress
Dissertaion: The
Art of Gunnery in Tudor England (1999; available as a free
PDF through -->) - Instrumental in War: Science, Research, and Instruments Between Knowledge and the World. Edited volume (2005)
- Subeditor for De Re Metallica: Studies in Medieval Metals (Ashgate Press, 2005)
- Wind & Water
in the Middle Ages: Fluid Technologies from
Antiquity to the Renaissance (ACMRS, 2006)
- NOTE: for reasons neither I nor ACMRS can fathom, Amazon and barnes and Noble (and Bookfinder...) will not list the book. Youc an order directly from the CUPS distribution service.
Curriculum Vita
Future Research Interests
One current (2007) research project focuses on Walter Nickerson Hill and the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, RI. Established in 1869 as a reaction to the changing technology in naval warfare during the Civil War, the NTS appears to have been the first scientific research laboratory of the American military, and Hill, a chemist from Harvard was hired to direct research and teaching there. This project grew out of general research for my edited volume on Scientific Instruments and Warfare, although it is an independent study.
I am also finishing an edition of Jacopo Aconcio's Lost Book of fortification (c1560), which will be a critical edition of the first translation into english of an Italian fortification treatise. For further information on the topic, see Lynn White's classic "Jacopo Aconcio as an engineer", where he concludes with the hope that Aconcio's lost treatise would some day be found - well, it has been [and see Stephen Johnson's note on the manuscript here; he found it independently and before I did, but has kindly ceded the editing work to me :]
In addition, I have teamed up with former colleagues from Michigan technological University’s Industrial Archaeology Program to work on the West Point Foundry, cold Spring, NY. MTU-IA has been excavating the WPF, a civilian foundry, since the summer of 2002, and from the summer of 2003 I have joined them to do historical/archival research on the site, as well as advise on foundry and machine shop practices. The work will likely culminate in conference presentations, articles, and perhaps a book project.
A longer-term monograph will be a wider study of the connections between the new military technology of the 16th and early 17th centuries, the social system it encountered, and the one it created. Technical expertise came to the fore at this time as an arbiter of status, and although it ultimately lost in the military context, it was not because elites fought the transition (in fact, they tried to participate), but particularly in England, as older norms remained strong and the technical promise was not fulfilled. Such promise, though, did feed into the ‘successful’ scientific revolutions of the next century.
Other projects I wish to continue or begin revolve around the interests of Thomas Harriot and Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (the “Wizard Earl”) and his circle and the context of early 17th century patronage of technical pursuits. With Pamela O. Long, I plan to translate a number of hitherto unnoticed 15th century German gunners’ manuals. I have begun research for a translation Bk. 9 of Joannes de Sancto-Geminiano’s Liber de exemplum et similitudinibus rerum a 14th century preachers’ manual which includes a book on inventors and inventions as preaching exempla. Woodworking tools interest me and late medieval depictions of Joseph as carpenter, the subject of a graduate paper, is a topic to which I wish to return as is a study of the transition from wood- to iron-bodied planes and the carpenters’ and joiners’ reaction to this ‘progress’. I would also like to return to my master’s thesis topic of automata and further investigate their popular reception in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and in particular pre-Civil War American examples.
Past Coursework and Research Subject Areas
Modern: Engineering Education and Mechanics’ Institutes, Industrial Archaeology, Natural Theology/Argument from Design
Early Modern: military technology, ballistics, fortification, Mechanism and automata, dynamics (pendula), fluid mechanics (Bernoullis), Leonardo
Medieval: military technology, woodworking technology, architecture, natural history lore
Ancient: civil engineering, military technology, natural philosophy (matter theory), optics
