SISS meets early careers - 26th May 2026
SISS meets early careers
A seminar series organized by the Italian Society for he History of Science
The Italian Society for the History of Science / Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza (SISS) is pleased to announce a Seminar Series:
SISS Meets Early Careers - 3rd series 2026
The series is conceived as an informal place for early career scholars to discuss their research, present, future and past. Each session focuses on broad themes in the history of science and knowledge, bringing together diverse approaches, methodologies and chronologies. The series is open to international scholars and broad collaboration between disciplinary fields.
All seminars are held online on Zoom: https://unipd.zoom.us/j/86590524102
Information:
26th May 2026, 4.30pm CET (EVENTO ANNULLATO)
Stephanie Reitzig
(Columbia University)
Title: “So ingenious, so full of art”: Women’s Artistic Practices and the Early Modern Sciences
Abstract:
In the past decade, scholars have shown a greater interest in the intersections of women’s artwork and the early modern sciences. Female scientific illustrators such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Alida Withoos have received heightened attention, while researchers have begun to explore the scientific dimensions of decorative arts such as embroidery. In this presentation, I will first survey the relationship between women’s artistic practices and the sciences as portrayed in this recent work, and then, drawing on my own research, identify two further directions which may be fruitful for scholars to pursue in this area. Studies to date collectively reveal that amateur and professional painting and needlework fostered women’s observation and depiction of the natural world and their interactions with scientific texts. I suggest that attending to the network-building dimensions of women’s artwork and probing gendered materialities can shed further light on the way gendered artistic practices facilitated and mediated women’s participation in the creation and circulation of natural knowledge.
Stephanie Reitzig is a PhD student in History at Columbia University. She specializes in early modern history of science, with a focus on the intersections of art, gender, and natural history in seventeenth and eighteenth-century central and northern Europe. Further info at https://history.columbia.edu/person/reitzig-stephanie/
Seminars:
- 24th March 2026, Giacomo Simoncelli (Sapienza University of Rome);
- 5th May 2026, Brenna McWhorter (University of Virginia);
- 26th May 2026, Stephanie Reitzig (Columbia University);
- 16th June 2026, José Miguel Ferreira (IHC NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)