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Articles by Paula E. Findlen
Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later
One night in 1975, on a camping trip to Bryce Canyon with her young sons, Carolyn Merchant lay awake contemplating the play of light on the living rock around her. At the time, she was a lecturer in the department of physics and natural sciences at the University of San Francisco, where she had taught for six years. Merchant had studied chemistry and philosophy in college, which led to her discovery of the history of science in graduate school in the Midwest.
Laura Bassi, Enlightenment Scientist
Obtaining a position as a professor at an esteemed university is, by modern standards, an impressive accomplishment in its own right. But imagine being awarded such a position in eighteenth-century Italy, at height of the Age of Enlightenment, when, as historian of science Paula Findlen describes, the industry of science was booming and scholars were clamoring for status and recognition. Imagine achieving this as a woman.
The Feminist Past History Can't Give Us
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
The Feminist Past History Can't Give Us
Recent efforts to commemorate Laura Bassi—a pioneering physicist in eighteenth-century Italy—often say more about us than the world of women in science. April 17 is now an unexpected milestone in my life as a historian. Just past midnight, my daughter Natalie pointed out that one of the very dead Italians I have written about for years, Laura Bassi—a physics professor and experimenter who lived and worked in eighteenth-century Bologna—was now a Google Doodle.
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
The ethnic cleansing and ongoing colonization of Palestine are a war not only against bodies, ecosystems, and livelihoods but against memory itself. This war against memory takes many explicit forms: from the casual denial of Palestinian existence embedded into political and legal rhetoric within the ethno-supremacist states of israel and america to the ongoing censorship and destruction of Palestinian historical records within israeli archives.
from ‘mass extinction’
mass extinction Nothing that interesting has come out from inside of us. Nothing worth hurting anything else for. How life became an endless, terrible competition. How you say you are a friend to women and girls, for example, but leave them to deal with it. How you say you could be a friend to an animal, or a grove of communicating aspens, but you leave them to deal with it. How life became an endless, terrible competition. What should we do with the alphas. What should we do with all the winners.
Two poems
Coccyx I give you a feeling, sweet jasmine, an absence of feeling, an overthinking, a compilation of gratitude, a composition of lamps as faces floating in the summer kitchen. I give you a glass of mint tea, a limit, kept to myself a bone I knew was named but not that one could feel in one’s body that, sitting, grew-stripped down into a new feeling without a name. I grew-shrank a new way to not feel.
Petrarch's Plague
What will we remember of this year of COVID-19 and how will we recall it? In 1374, during the final year of a long and interesting life, the Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarch observed that his society had lived with “this plague, without equal in all the centuries", for over twenty-five years.His fortune and misfortune had been to outlast so many friends and family who perished before him, many of them from this devastating disease.
Petrarch’s Plague: Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic
The Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch lived through the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which saw up to 200 million die from plague across Eurasia and North Africa. Through the unique record of letters and other writings Petrarch left us, Paula Findlen explores how he chronicled, commemorated, and mourned his many loved ones who succumbed, and what he might be able to teach us today.
The Public Domain Review
Petrarch's Plague: Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic By Paula Findlen The Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch lived through the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which saw up to 200 million die from plague across Eurasia and North Africa.
The Virus Has Captured the Means of Production
Image: Kate Winslet in Contagion In films such as Contagion, virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital. Between 1918 and 1920, a strain of H1N1 flu infected 25 percent of the world’s population (500 million people) and killed between 1 and 6 percent (17–100 million people). The point of origin of that particular strain is unknown and probably unknowable. But its rapid global spread was enabled by the transport and communications networks of warring empires.
Holyoke Mass., an Ethnography
Jan 1, 2007 18 Min read time A short story. What promise. Incorporated in 1850, she was awarded medals and monikers: Birthplace of Volleyball, Queen of Industrial Cities, Paper City of the World. Of the world. Paper. Paper was like gold here. The paper mills, which opened in 1849, started everything. Twenty-five paper mills at its zenith. The population boomed, rising from 4,600 to 60,000 inhabitants from 1885 to 1920.
A Festschrift for ‘Ernst Who???’
Krenek illustrated by P. Hoffman from our original Winter 1975 issue. From the Winter 1975 issue of Boston Review: Glenn Gould argues that despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century. Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music Ernst Krenek with contributions by Will Ogdon and John L.
Another Way to Love This World
In a wrenching dialogue, a man searches for human connection, even as he recalls childhood abuse. Translated from the French by Amanda DeMarco. Short Story This short story was first published in Allies and is featured in our new special project: When I was little, my parents didn’t do anything to keep the world, Morocco, and the men of our neighborhood from raping me. Raping me again and again. It was an open secret. And a taboo at the same time. Touch him. Caress him. Penetrate him. Hit him.
What Would Boccaccio Say About COVID-19?
Boccaccio talking with other Florentines who fled the plague, from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Decameron. Image: Wikimedia Commons The Florentine humanist’s description of the Black Death in the Decameron remains one of the most thoughtful accounts of a society living under a pandemic. The plague haunts our imagination as an indelible memory.
Chapati Recipe
“Pinch off fist-sized balls and roll these into flat circles. Circles you turned in the morning of the coup.” Short Story This short story was first published in Allies as a finalist in the Fall 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest, and is featured in our new special project: 1. In a large bowl, stir two cups of flour, one cup warm water, salt and sugar to taste. Add a spoonful of oil. Knead to a thick consistency.
Meniscus
“'I felt no hunger but the habit of food struck me intensely. My nightgown was grubby and torn. My limbs were scraped, spotted with yellow bruises, but I felt no pain.” Short Story This short story was first published in Global Dystopias and is featured in our new special project: After the boat arrived we boarded a khaki bus and were taken to the cabins. The silver water had been cold to my bloodless fingers. There were no fish, no birds to disturb its mirror surface.
People Who Report More Stress
Beating cancer should be the biggest challenge in his life, not trying to catch a cab in Manhattan. Short Story This short story was a semi-finalist in the Fall 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest, and is featured in our new special project: Gus usually hails them—the cabs. He’s a magnet. A few times, he has stopped them with an errant wave of his hand.
Memoirs of an Imaginary Country
Image: Canaletto, The Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day In a lost tale of Casanova, the citizens of a country at the center of the Earth must give up their home—and their women—to colonizers. Short Story This short story was first published in Global Dystopias and is featured in our new special project: The center of the Earth is full of things the surface thinks it has discarded. You called the year your explorers arrived in my country year 1. We called that year 10,077.
The Neighbors
The Spring 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner “The Neighbors” is the story of two women figuring out the nature of a desire they don’t have words for, inventing a world between them before bringing it down. Told in the spare language of a fairy tale, set a little outside of time, it is, sentence by sentence, a stark evocation of the game they make between them, the stakes of which are their entire lives.
Agnus Dei: Mars
Aug 18, 2014 1 Min read time Less than a light year ahead, this atmosphere swirls and thickens towards equilibrium, the first conifers pricking the air, dawn a blue yonder, the robin’s egg. This world that would not move, this world that once looked plain and red as sealing wax covers its face with grass, with a noise like breath blown in a bottle. Despite the warnings, I’ll step out unhindered by tank or mask, become too winded for words, or even listening.
The Rabbits
Apr 20, 2018 They expressed my desire To mount and be Mounted as they scurried Into the darkest parts of what This poem is featured in What Nature. Order a copy today. I caught a colony In couples on the lawn As I pulled into my driveway After a night of bare music, Of drinking on my feet Because I think I look better Standing. I should lie.
@Tubman’s_Rock
Apr 17, 2018 People also ask what is Harriet Tubman most famous for? Flying bondsmen on French leave steal away They drove Emmett Till toward Money, Mississippi Behind enemy lines our Moses never lost a passenger People also ask why is Harriet Tubman important to the world?
Social Studies of Science
This abstract is currently unavailable
Hitting Budapest
Nov 1, 2010 21 Min read time A short story. Ed. note: On July 11, 2011, this story won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Known as “the African Booker,” the Caine Prize is awarded annually for a short story in English by an African writer. The winner receives £10,000 and a residency at Georgetown University. We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.
Between the Palm and the Ear, Is the Master’s Language
Oct 17, 2016 We move within the snow-chromed world—: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet . . . We move within the snow-chromed world—: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet. Along a street white as lamp light into the winter, walking—: like language, a new text. I touch her with the eyes of my skin. The way I read any beloved—: from the ramus of the left jaw down to the cuneiform of the right foot. She isn’t so much what she is—: and becomes herself only when added to the space where she isn’t.
Before Europe’s Intrusion
On a cold, wet day in January 2008, Robert Batchelor decided to take a peek at a map in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, an old and venerable collection founded in 1602 and filled with arcane treasures.
Poet's Sampler: Damian Rogers
When I first encountered Toronto writer Damian Rogers’s latest manuscript, Dear Leader, I dreamt her poems. I had been reading them for days, and in my sleep a voice-over voice said to me: “Murder of Crows.” And then I saw trees draped with knowing crows, strip mall parking lots, waste, cold stars, and a terrific crow-studded sunset. Like this image, Rogers’s poems are ominously beautiful and sage; they lay bare discordant fractures.
The Mathematical Shape of Modernity
On August 10, 1632, only 10 months before the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for his advocacy of Copernican astronomy, five Jesuits met in Rome to discuss a seemingly arcane point: Is a mathematical continuum composed of indivisibles? That was not the first time that the Jesuit revisors, an august group empowered to ensure the orthodoxy of the Society of Jesus’ curriculum and publications, debated the problem.
How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century
Around 2008, I began to notice an interesting fact: Google Books was reshaping the way I did research. I was on sabbatical and had more time than usual to pursue various projects. Like most historians, I went to libraries and archives in search of paper evidence, but I also delighted in digital discoveries, happily downloading my best finds.
Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx
More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was convinced he had cracked it. He was very wrong. Daniel Stolzenberg looks at Kircher's Egyptian Oedipus, a book that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” Published Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.
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