New Books in the History of Science

This is the third time I have the great fortune of interviewing Tom Mullaney. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history discipline, and the work we are discussing today, I believe, will serve as the perfect bridge from Tom’s historical scholarship to the wider, reading public. We are discussing Tom’s latest book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W.W. Norton, 2026). Tom’s book takes on some of the most philosophically rich ideas at the center of both history and memory. Over time, things come apart: objects, archives, ephemera, people, memories, histories. For millennia, we relied on common tools to remember the past: oral tradition, writing, and artifacts. In under 200 years, we developed more advanced information technology like the camera, phonograph, typewriter, computer, and more. The information encoded by these devices has a shelf life too, decaying over time, disintegrating, becoming obscured, getting deaccessioned. How We Disappear explores this process through the lens of family tragedy: the death of Tom’s parents and the attempts to recover and remember the past. What happens when we try to recover the lives of our parents, the people who shape our world, and what do we do when we discover the unexpected? To take us through his brilliant new book, I’m pleased today to have Tom Mullaney on the podcast.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. From their various perspectives, they made ambitious claims about the contributions that their emergent expertise made to the understanding of, and intervention in, human bio-psycho-social development. The international movement that arose out of this catalyzed the institutionalization of new domains of knowledge, including developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, and child psychiatry.Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford UP, 2020) charts the evolution of the child science movement in Russia from the Crimean War to the Second World War. It is the first comprehensive history in English of the rise and fall of this multidisciplinary field across the late Imperial and Soviet periods. Drawing on ideas and concepts emanating from a variety of theoretical domains, the study provides new insights into the concerns of Russia's professional intelligentsia with matters of biosocial reproduction and investigates the incorporation of scientific knowledge and professional expertise focused on child development into the making of the welfare/warfare state in the rapidly changing political landscape of the early Soviet era.
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Disabled Empire: The Colonial Body in First World War Britain (U Chicago Press, 2026) examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped the medical treatments that the British state offered to several million Black and brown servicemen during World War I. In recovering the voices and experiences of these soldiers, Hilary R. Buxton illustrates how they navigated the institutional culture of the imperial military and how they helped to shape health and welfare systems well beyond the interwar period.

The Great War was the first time that troops and volunteers from nearly all reaches of the Empire participated in the war effort side-by-side. Despite official attempts at segregation, colonial troops met in trenches, mobile camps, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships, and convalescent homes. Just as importantly, those organizing treatment encountered men of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures from across and beyond the British Empire. For British officials, this moment offered an opportunity to remake colonial efficiency and medical knowledge. Yet, as Buxton shows, colonial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory: they were vocal participants who demanded a say in the therapies prescribed to them, the rations they required, the psychiatric care they received, and the prosthetics with which they were fitted. Together, these encounters profoundly remade colonial relations, reshaping imperial science, administration, and colonial understandings of subjecthood.Disabled Empire pushes literature on the war and medicine outside its national, Eurocentric focus to confront the colonial logic of global health inequity.

Hilary R. Buxton is assistant professor of history at Kenyon College.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Frank Stahnisch, Professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary in Canada, about his new book Great Minds in Despair – The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989 (2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Great Minds in Despair examines the long-term effects of the forced migration of neuroscientists from the German lands in the 20th century on scientific and medical cultures in North America, and on the researchers themselves. The book traces the lives and careers of approximately 400 German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. It is a fascinating read that anyone interested in migration, science history, Nazi Germany, transatlantic relations, Jewish Studies, and much more should read.

Reference

Stahnisch, F. W. (2025). Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989. McGill-Queen's University Press.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the
organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific
contributions to the development and functioning of the whole. There
are competing organism concepts even today, but the 18th century was a
critical period in which thinkers gradually shed prior ideas of life in
terms of a body with a principle of spontaneous motion, a body as a mere
physical mechanism, or a body infused with vital spirits. In When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian approaches to the concept of organism (Routledge, 2026),
Philippe Huneman combines extensive scholarship in the history and
philosophy of biology with Kantian critical philosophy and metaphysics
to trace Kant’s contributions to the emerging organism concept. Huneman
discusses the Critique of the Power of Judgment and other
writings in which Kant developed a view of organisms as natural purposes
and in which part-whole reasoning by the faculty of judgment is a
condition of the possibility of thinking of organisms at all. Huneman,
who is director of research at the Institute of History and Philosophy
of Science and Technology at CNRS and University of Paris 1 –
Pantheon-Sorbonne, provides an account of Kant’s thinking that is
accessible yet promises to bring this neglected aspect of Kant into
dialogue with contemporary Kantian scholarship. 
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