This NWO-funded research programme focuses on the assumptions and methodology of the writing of history of science. History of science is in many respects a flourishing discipline: it currently yields an impressive volume of studies. Systematic reflection about the ways in which history of science may…

How did British scholars and scientists in the period of discipline formation envision, experience and resist scholarly temptations?

This project aims to situate the current policy concept of ‘valorization of scientific knowledge’ in historical and epistemological perspectives. Conceptual understanding of the utility of scientific practices is developed in dialogue with historical analyses of the politics of knowledge in European…

Is it possible to formulate a new conceptual foundation for attributing an evaluative role to historiography of science, without relinquishing the historiographic sensitivity of recent work in the discipline?

This dissertation, Layered Loyalties: The Natuurkundige Commissie in the Netherlands Indies (1820-1850), studies the Natuurkundige Commissie.

Promotor: F.J. van Lunteren, E. Jorin

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

This project will construct an inventory of possible conceptions of the resistance of the world to scientists’ claims and theories.

The aim of this project is to foster a historiography that does justice both to the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed by local, contingent, and contextual processes, and the claims of science to objective validity.

How do ideas concerning the academic study of religion relate to the socio-cultural and political context in which they are developed?

In what way is constructivist logic able to account for both the role of the judging agent in inference and the universal claims of logical validity?

“Temminck’s Order” is the scientific biography of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1850), a Dutch naturalist and the first director of ’s Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a grant of 750,000 euros to the 'Visualising the Unknown in 17th-century Science and Society' project. Researchers will reconstruct how seventeenth-century scientists recorded and shared their groundbreaking microscopic discoveries. We…

Bird, butterfly, fish: when you look through a children’s book, you usually don’t think about the fact that humans divided these animals, depicted in bright colours, into categories. Yet, this division has been discussed for centuries. In her PhD dissertation, Didi van Trijp shows how natural scientists…

Is scientific research useful? In his dissertation, Jorrit Smit argues that in order to answer this question one should not look at, for example, prominent scholars or influential organisations, but at places where knowledge exchange and co-creation take place. Promotion 6 May.

Didi van Trijp started her PhD project at LUCAS in October 2015. Her PhD project is part of A New History of Fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550-1880, a project directed by prof. dr. Paul Smith.

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