Congress 'Sites of Chemistry in 19th Century'
Schedule: From 6 july 2012 to 7 july 2012. Friday and saturday at 10:00 to 20:00.
Place: Conference Room of the institute (Plaza Cisneros, 4. Valencia)
The Institute for the History of Medicine and Science López Piñero (joint centre of the CSIC and the University of Valencia), located in the Palacio de Cerveró, presents the congress Sites of Chemistry in the 19th Century, which will take place next July 6 and 7 in the conference room of the institute. The meeting was organized by José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, Mar Cuenca, Antonio García-Belmar, Ximo Guillem and Ignacio Suay-Matallana. It is the second of four annual conferences that make up the project Sites of Chemistry (1700-2000), funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.
The aim of this second conference is to study the variety of spaces where chemistry was practised in the 19th century. It is interesting, first, to get a deeper understanding of the ways and purposes of chemistry in the different areas in which it was practiced, and how the physical, social, cultural and economic organization of these spaces determined or reflected the activities that took place in them.
Since the late 1980s, when Owen Hannaway published his Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science and Steven Shapin and wrote his House of Experiment, the historiography of science has produced a great variety of studies that provide the categories of analysis and methodological strategies to integrate the physical, cultural and symbolic characteristics of spaces in the analysis of cognitive, social or practical activities that took place within them.
The project Sites of chemistry, and in particular this conference focused on the 19th century, aims to promote the study of space as an active ingredient in the shaping of chemical activities. The creation of spaces is considered here as an element that reflects and shapes what the occupants thought, said and did.
Organized into five thematic sessions, the seventeen papers approved by the scientific committee will make it possible to address from a spatial and geographical perspective themes such as the creation of figure of the expert, the interactions between research and teaching, the development of chemical industry, the acquisition of organisational models of research or the circulation of knowledge between different spaces and contexts. In each session, a short time will be dedicated to the presentation of the papers and to a critical review by a specialist in the field. There will be also a long time for discussion with the audience.
All project details are available on the website www.sitesofchemistry.org.
The scientific committee consists of: Marco Beretta (Florence), José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez (Valencia), Ana Carneiro (Lisbon), Antonio García-Belmar (Valencia), Ernst Homburg (Maastricht), Muriel Le Roux (Paris), John Perkins (Oxford) and Geert Vanpaemel (Leuven).
Jose Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, Mar Cuenca, Antonio García-Belmar (belmar@ua.es), Ximo Guillem and Ignacio Suay-Matallana.
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Contact: difusion.ihmc@uv.es
