Events

Past Event

Louis Gerdelan - Catastrophic Knowledge: Early Modern Disaster Science

May 23, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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Online

Event Description

Disasters of various kinds are seldom out of the news, and they also formed an object of dreadful fascination for premodern people. In this talk Louis Gerdelan will look at how interactions among scientists, doctors, astrologers, and churchmen in the 17th and 18th centuries were responsible for forming the foundations of modern disaster knowledge.

Focusing on researchers from the British, French, and Spanish empires who collected and analyzed data about storms, earthquakes, and epidemics, the talk will discuss the emergence of methods for vetting and analyzing data from these destructive phenomena, and the implications these innovations had for the way people understood disasters in this period.

Event Speaker

Louis Gerdelan, Haas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Science History Institute

Event Information

Free and open to the public. No registration required. The event can be streamed via YouTube. For more information, please visit the event webpage

Hosted by the Science History Institute