Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with David Alff and Danielle Spratt, editors of Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
What inspired you to write this book?
Histories of Science originated as a series of conversations between scholars attending the annual meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). These conversations often started in formal seminars hosted by the ASECS Science Caucus, then carried on in conference halls, over lunches, and even at a few late night film screenings and pizza parties. Each of us was working on wildly different topics (Sculpture! Birds! Placebos! Irrigation! Etc.!) but together we realized how all these seemingly disparate phenomena told stories about the production and application of natural knowledge. We decided to trace these stories through a multigraph that could showcase the intellectual diversity of science studies today.
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
There is so much happening in science studies right now. The field draws its vigor from the many methods of its practitioners: formal criticism, new historicism, object-oriented ontology, earth system theory, mythology, plant studies, the medical humanities, performance studies, and infrastructure studies, among many more approaches. We hope that our book gives readers a sense of this energy and excitement—that they see science studies both as an attempt to understand how people have understood nature, and a convergence of methods for analyzing human culture.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
It took us seven years to finish this book, from the first emails we sent contributors in Fall 2018 to publication day in May 2025. In that time, the world shifted beneath our feet: a global pandemic, war in Europe and the Middle East, the ebb-flow-torrent of populist conservatism in the United States (a movement often animated by anti-scientific skepticism)—and all this against the backdrop of ongoing climate change and the sixth mass extinction of plants of and animals. What surprised us most while editing this book was the eighteenth-century’s persistent relevance to the concerns of today, whether it was reading about early modern theories of contagion, the gendered dynamics of empirical witnessing, or the social cost-benefit of built environments. This project helped us see strange times from the vantage of history.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
Our introduction went through many drafts before we decided to simply say what the book was and why people should read it (always a sound strategy for introductions!) While trying to show that our shared project was wide-ranging yet coherent, we came across an amazing passage by Thomas Sprat, an early champion of experimental science, and chronicler/publicist for the Royal Society of London. Sprat told Society members to “heap up a mixt Mass of Experiments, without digesting them into any perfect model.” Sprat saw the value of letting things stay messy. Experimenters could make observations without needing to reconcile that knowledge to some grand epistemological scheme. Coherence could come later. It was just the advice we needed to preface our own miscellany.
