Teaching
Teaching at the Chair of the History of Science
Winter term 26/27
Tuesday, 2–4 pm, Prof. Dr Omar Nasim, Room: H39, GRIPS (external link, opens in a new window)
31150 Lecture: ‘Introduction to the History of Science’
Wednesday, 12 noon–1 pm, Prof. Dr Omar Nasim, Room H22, GRIPS (external link, opens in a new window)
31151 Tutorial for the lecture “Introduction to the History of Science”
Wednesday, 4–6 pm, Prof. Dr Omar Nasim, Dr Christian Reiß, Room: VG 1.37, GRIPS (external link, opens in a new window)
31155 “Master’s seminar for advanced students”
Thursday, 10 am–12 noon, Dr Christian Reiß, Prof. Dr Marcus Hahn, Room: R005
35527 Interdisciplinary Introduction to the Master’s programme “Literature – Knowledge – Media”
Friday, 12 noon–2 pm, Dr Sarah Qidwai, M.A. Torsten Bendl, Room: PT 2.0.4, GRIPS (external link, opens in a new window)
31157 Seminar “Visualising History: Science, Cinema and Public Knowledge”
Registration in SPUR is not required. Please enrol via Flex Now and GRIPS at the start of the semester.
Colloquium Archive
Winter term 25/26
29 October 2025
Speakers: Prof. Dr Nils Güttler, Dr Christian Reiß, Dr Mareike Vennen
Book launch: ‘The Managed Environment’
26 November 2025
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Max Stadler (HU Berlin)
Title: Start-Up West Berlin: Shifts in the Direction of Entrepreneurial Science, 1960–1990
10 December 2025
Speaker: M.A. Torsten Bendl (University of Regensburg)
Title: “I only ask you to handle these slides with astronomical, and not with photographic care” – Max Wolf’s astrophotographs as commercially traded lantern slides
21 January 2026 at 6.00 pm at the Regensburg Observatory
Lecturer: Dr Charlotte Bigg (CNRS Paris)
Title: Electronic Vistas on the Universe: The Digital Turn of Astronomical Photography
28 January 2026
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Henning Schmidgen (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Title: Media and Organs: Instruments of Knowledge in McLuhan, Kapp and von Humboldt
Summer term 2025
23 April 2025
Lecturer: Dr Giulia Simonini (TU Berlin)
Title: Jacob Christian Schäffer, Stephan Loibel and coloured illustrations of insects in the 18th century
Please note the change of venue and the different start time: the lecture will take place at 5.00 pm in the Bonhoeffersaal at the Evangelisches Bildungswerk Regensburg, Am Oelberg 2, 93047 Regensburg.
7 May 2025
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Kapil Raj (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris)
Title: Moving Mesmerism from Europe to India: Dr James Esdaile’s Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta, 1845–1850
26 May 2025
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Title: Is there any good history of quantum mechanics, and if so, why should we care?
Please note that, unlike usual, the lecture will take place on a Monday. The time is 4.00 pm. The venue is yet to be announced.
4 June 2025
Lecturer: Charlotte Vallaster (Master’s student at the University of Regensburg)
Title: Ronald Laing, Thomas Szasz and David Cooper: Their journey from psychiatrists to leading figures in the anti-psychiatry movement against the backdrop of the socio-political trends of the 1960s
18 June 2025
Lecturer: M.A. Nelli Kisser (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Title: Interconnection, Exploitation, Destruction: Theory, Practice and Wartime Application of Applied Entomology under National Socialism
16 July 2025
Lecturer: Luis Geiger (Master’s student at the University of Regensburg)
Title: The Delayed Reception of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution in Germany – a ‘German Sonderweg’ in modern biology?
Winter term 2024/25
13 November 2024
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Christian Holtorf (Coburg University of Applied Sciences)
Title: Can the history of science be relevant today? Or: The ant algorithm
11 December 2024
Lecturer: Meike Katzek (University of Erfurt)
Title: Intellectuals, experts and hoaxers. Figures of truth in the Science Wars of the 1990s
8 January 2025
Lecturer: Dr Nicole Litzel (City of Regensburg)
Title: Science communication and municipal science marketing in Regensburg, the City of Science
22 January 2025
Speakers: Prof. Amanda Reese (York), Revd. Prof. Charlotte Sleigh (UCL), Dr Sam Robinson (York)
Title: New Narratives for a Digital World: Engaging the Public in Science and Faith
The lecture will take place online via Zoom
Summer term 2024
24 April 2024
Lecturer: Dr Anne MacKinney (HU Berlin)
Title: The Value of the Priceless: Natural History Collections between Science, Bureaucracy and Economics around 1800
15 May 2024
Lecturer: Prof. Dr Kelley Wilder (Photographic History Research Centre and De Montfort University, Leicester)
Title: Photoeconomics and Astronomy
in conjunction with the lecture series ‘Photography and the Sciences’
22 May 2024
Lecturer: PD Dr Martina Kölbl-Ebert (LMU Munich)
Title: “German Geology – Geology under National Socialism”
29 May 2024
Field trip to Waldsassen – full day
12 June 2024
Lecturer: Dr Hanin Hannouch (Weltmuseum Vienna)
Title: Circulation without printing: The international reach of Interferential Colour Photography, c. 1900
in conjunction with the lecture series ‘Photography and the Sciences’
19 June 2024
Lecturer: Dr Kim Todzi (University of Hamburg)
Title: ‘Pharmacy and Colonialism: The “active principle” and the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry, using quinine as an example’
The lecture will take place online via Zoom
Summer Term 2023
26 April 2023
Dr Luminita Gatejel (IOS Regensburg)
The drainage of the Danube floodplains in Romania (20th century)
10 May 2023
Mag. Dr. Dr. Hanna Worliczek (MPIWG Berlin)
A Cosmopolitan Parasite: Tracking Toxoplasma between Laboratory Diagnostics, the Clinic and Regionalised Public Health Measures since the 1950s
24 May 2023
Dr Mobeen Hussain (Trinity College Dublin)
“From my own knowledge and experience”: Hakims, Western medicine and women’s health in India, c. 1880s–1940s
21 June 2023
Sophia Gräfe, MA (HU Berlin)
Behavioural knowledge: Scenes of writing and observation of behaviour at the Zoological Institute of Humboldt University of Berlin (1948–1968)
Please note: this guest lecture will take place online
5 July 2023
Dr Claudia Cristalli (Tilburg University)
A ‘careful examination of all kinds of phenomena’: Methodology and Psychical Research at the end of the nineteenth century
19 July 2023
Dr Tilmann Siebeneichner (ZZF Potsdam)
Western Europe and Outer Space. Science, Technology and Security in the Second Cold War. (In cooperation with the City of Regensburg as part of the ‘Mars findet Stadt’ project)
https://wissenschaft-in-der-stadt.de/mars-findet-stadt/ (external link, opens in a new window)
Winter term 2022/23
26 October 2022
Meric Tanik, EHESS; the guest lecture will take place online
Concretising Knowledge Circulation: Networks, Money and Politics
9 November 2022
Torsten Bendl, University of Regensburg
Multiplying Knowledge: Karl Stöckl and the Translation of Scientific Research
23 November 2022
Dr Jaume Navarro, University of the Basque Country / MPIWG Berlin
Science, Religion and Nationalism. A historiographical approach
7 December 2022
Floris Winckel, LMU Munich
From Pencil to Camera: How the Depiction of Snowflakes Changed in the Nineteenth Century
21 December 2022
Dr Marjan Wardaki (Yale University); the guest lecture will take place online
Decolonial science: Muslims in interwar Germany and the making of modern Afghanistan
18 January 2023
Prof. Dr Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds
Women’s Transnational Collaboration in Engineering and Science during the Cold War era (Co-author: Dr Emily Rees-Körner)
1 February 2023
Dr Daniel Liu (LMU Munich/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Summer Term 2022
11 May 2022
Eleyne Wenninger (University of Regensburg)
Title: Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge. Dimensions of non-academic criticism of genetic engineering in the Federal Republic of Germany, c. 1979–1989
25 May 2022
Dr Emilie Skulberg (University of Amsterdam)
Title: Absence as existence: The production and reception of Event Horizon Telescope black hole imaging
8 June 2022
Dr Marco Tamborini (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Title: The Robotic Approach: Redesigning the Boundaries between Nature, Technology and Society
22 June 2022
Prof. Dr Bernard Lightman (University of Toronto)
Title: T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer and Eastern Religious Traditions: Flipping the Narrative
6 July 2022
Kristine Palmieri (University of Chicago, IZEA Halle)
Title: “An Archaeology of Texts and a Philology of Things: Christian Gottlob Heyne and die Wissenschaft des Alterthums in eighteenth-century Germany” (co-organised with the academic research network KNOW-IN)
20 July 2022
Dr Dr Susanne Hoffmann (University of Regensburg, Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Title: Some Methods of Digital Historical Research (with Examples from the History of Astronomy)
Winter term 2021/22
3 November 2021
Lecturer: Paul Schillinger (University of Regensburg)
Title: These Dead, but Still Eloquent Witnesses of the Past – Scientific Racism in 19th-century American anthropology
17 November 2021
Lecturer: Chaokang Tai (University of Regensburg)
Title: Producing Astrophotographic Knowledge: Glass Plate Photography at Leiden Observatory, 1890–1960
1 December 2021
Lecturer: Katharina Bick (University of Regensburg)
Title: Tables, Diagrams, Calculations: Analysing the photographic plates of the 1905 solar eclipse expedition at Hamburg Observatory
15 December 2021
Lecturer: Fiona Amery (Cambridge)
Title: Capturing the Northern Lights: Standardising the Practice of Auroral Photography During the Second International Polar Year, 1932–1933
12 January 2022
Lecturer: Christian Reiß (University of Regensburg)
Title: The History of Ecology between Biophilosophy and Applied Zoology, 1900–1963
26 January 2022
Lecturer: Sarah Qidwai (University of Regensburg)
Title: Sir Syed (1817–1898) and Science: Popularisation in Nineteenth-Century India
Winter term 2019/20
23 October 2019
Lecturer: Dr Anja Sattelmacher (HU Berlin)
Title: The historical documentary film as an eyewitness
6 November 2019
Dr Martin Jähnert (MPIWG/TU Berlin)
Title: Measuring the Unstable: Photometric Practices of Knowledge and Technologies of Light (1830–1880)
20 November 2019
Lecturer: Dr Sigrid Leyssen (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Title: Animation as a Precision Instrument. Psychology, Film Studies and Experimental Techniques
4 December 2019
Lecturer: Dr Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen (University of Roskilde)
Title: Critique and Culture: The Battle of Antiquarianism and the Purpose of the Past in Enlightenment Germany
18 December 2019
Lecturer: Dr Daniel Liu (ICI Berlin)
Title: Envisioned Matter: Microscopic Imagination and Microtechnique after the Abbe Diffraction Limit, 1874–1939
15 January 2020
Lecturer: Dr Elena Canadelli (University of Padua)
Title: The Circulation of Botanists’ Photographic Portraits at the Padova Botanic Garden (19th–20th Centuries): Visual Studies meet Mobility Studies
29 January 2020
Lecturer: Julia Gruevska, MA (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena)
Title: Psyche & Physis in the Biophilosophy of the 1920s. On Understanding and Explaining ‘Manifestations of Life’
5 February 2020
Lecturer: Anna Echterhölter (University of Vienna)
Title: Regimes of Measurement: On the Global History of the Metric System
Summer Term 2019
| Date | |
| 24 April 2019 | Dr Susanne Schmidt (Free University of Berlin): Midlife Crisis: The Story of a Forgotten Idea |
| 8 May 2019 | Dr Laurens Schlicht (HU Berlin): Technologies of Truth: Interrogation Techniques and Testimony Psychology in the Women’s Criminal Investigation Department, 1926–1944 |
| 5 June 2019 | Annika Vosseler (University of Leipzig): Drawing Landscapes: How European Missionary Societies Depicted Southern Africa, 1850s–1890s
|
| 26 June 2019 | Dr Elena Serrano (MPIWG Berlin): Experimenting for the Public Good: Women Testing Maternal Food Substitutes in Late Eighteenth-century Spain |
| 3 July 2019 |
Martin Meiske (Rachel Carson Centre/LMU Munich) Shift workers in the shadow of major construction projects. Sea canals as sites of geological knowledge production at the turn of the century |
| 17 July 2019 | Marcus Carrier (University of Bielefeld): Chemical Knowledge in the Courtroom: Forensic Toxicology in 19th-century Germany |
Winter term 2018/19
| Date | |
| 24 October 2018 | Anke te Heesen (Berlin): The Way of the Scientist, 1967 |
| 7 November 2018 | Caterina Schürch (Munich): “Reinforcements from Unexpected Quarters.” On the integration of biological and physical research methods in the early 20th century |
| 21 November 2018 | Michael Hagner (Zurich): The Weight of Books (joint event with Regensburg University Library) |
| 5 December 2018 | Alrun Schmidtke (Berlin): Between Conference and Cocktail Party – Acquiring Manuscripts in Academic Publishing, 1925–1965 |
| 19 December 2018 | Nina Gerlach (Münster): Painting in the (post-)digital age – data visualisation from Suprematism to big data mapping |
| 16 January 2019 | Mathias Grote (Berlin): From the History of Science to the History of Science? Chemistry’s Past in Gmelin’s ‘Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie’, 1930s–1960s |
| 30 January 2019 | Julia Maier (Potsdam/Regensburg): Drawings on Astronomy and Optics in Alexander von Humboldt’s Travel Diaries |
Summer Term 2018
| Date | |
| 17 April 2018 | David Hyder (Ottawa, Canada): Kant and Einstein on the Causal Order of Time (joint event with the Philosophy Colloquium) |
| 18 April 2018 | Benjamin Prinz (Weimar): Electronics in the bloodstream: feedback systems in Gibbon’s experimental heart-lung machines, 1930–1953 |
| 2 May 2018 | Fabian Krämer (Munich): De-Centering Snow. C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ and the Historiography of the Great Divide |
| 9 May 2018 | Michael Friedman (Berlin): Paper, plaster, strings: the rise and fall of material mathematical models as epistemic things at the turn of the 19th century |
| 18 May 2018 | Michael Markert (Göttingen): Provenance research in human embryology. A workshop report |
| 23 May 2018 | Lis Brack-Bernsen (Regensburg): Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology – The Role of Mathematics in the Interpretation of Ancient Cuneiform Texts |
| 30 May 2018 | Daniel Eggstein (Konstanz): “A Social Movement in Science”. Environmentally-oriented research in Germany and the USA in the 1970s and 1980s |
| 13 June 2018 | Ute Frietsch (Wolfenbüttel): “Here in the Wilderness” – The alchemical correspondence between John Winthrop Jr. and Samuel Hartlib |
| 27 June 2018 | Roland Wittje (Chennai, India): “Instruments of scientific and technical development: German-Indian cooperation at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 1959–1974” |
| 11 July 2018 | Carmen Perez-Gonzalez (Wuppertal): How Scientific Photography Entered Iran During the Naseri Period (1948–1896) |
Winter term 2017/18
| Date | |
| 8 November 2017 | Julia Bloemer (Munich): The Race for Venus: The History of Astronomy in the 18th Century and Why Bavarian Monasteries Are Worth a Look |
| 22 November 2017 | Erna Fiorentini (Berlin): Questions regarding the concept of visualisation / Questioning the Notion of Visualisation |
| 6 December 2017 | Nils Güttler (Zurich): Aerial Knowledge: The Sky over Frankfurt, 1909 – c. 1950 |
| 10 January 2018 | Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent): Making Sense of Art and Science |
| 24 January 2018 | Charlotte Bigg (Centre Alexandre Koyré/CRNS): Light, Colour, and Brightness on a Plate: Photography and the Chemistry of the Stars |
Summer Term 2017
| Date | |
| 3 May 2017 | Christian Joas (Munich): Interacting Fields: Analogy and Knowledge Transfer in Post-war Physics |
| 17 May 2017 | Daniel Belteki (University of Kent): Going in Circles: Reassembling the Airy Transit Circle and its History |
| 31 May 2017 | Mareike Vennen (Berlin): Working on the Dinosaur: On Collecting, Knowledge and Desire in Relation to Museum Objects in the Early 20th Century |
| 14 June 2017 | Fabio De Sio (Düsseldorf): The Ghost and the Machine. J. C. Eccles, the Fate of Physiology and the Dawn of Brain Science in Post-WWII Britain (and the Commonwealth) |
| 28 June 2017 | Rebekah Higgith (University of Kent): Instruments, Institutions and Iconography: The Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers and the World of London Science |
| 12 July 2017 | Stefanie Klamm (Berlin): Photographic Objects in Archaeology, Ethnology and Art History: The Materiality of Photographs and Photographic Archives and Their Role in the Production of Knowledge |
| 26 July 2017 | Nadine Metzger (Erlangen): Constitutional Theory as a Source of Hope – ‘Constitution’ in the medical crisis discourse of the late 1920s |
Winter Term 16/17
| Date | |
| 2 November 2016 | Geoffrey Belknap (Leicester): Participating in Victorian Natural History through the Illustrated Periodical |
| 16 November 2016 | Christopher Halm (Regensburg): The Early History of Agricultural Chemistry: Intellectual Communities, Organising Principles and the Concept of Agricultural Chemistry |
| 30 November 2016 | Christian Forster (Jena): Practical Activities within the German Uranium Association – How Does One Build a Uranium Machine? |
| 14 December 2016 | Mathias Grote (Berlin): Vintage Science. Temporality and Knowledge in the History of 20th-Century Taxonomy |
| 11 January 2017 | Stefan Probst (Vienna): Micro-slow motion, narcotics, flow diagrams. Practices of visualisation in the zoological laboratory of the 1920s |
| 25 January 2017 | Robert Meunier (Kassel): The Gene in Development: From the ‘One Gene – One Enzyme’ Hypothesis to Gene Networks |
| 8 February 2017 | Lea Bühlmann (Basel): Internalised Environments, Externalised Organisms. Towards a Genealogy of Ecological Thought |