The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) invites applications for Postgraduate Representative, a two- or three-year term to begin in January 2023.

As leader of SHAC’s extensive Graduate Network, the Postgraduate Representative serves as an advocate for early career scholars in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and related fields. They are chiefly responsible for designing, planning, and facilitating the Society’s Postgraduate Workshop, an annual international meeting that brings together early career researchers to network and present works in progress. The Postgraduate Representative also attends biennial Council meetings, where they serve as liaison between the Graduate Network and the Society’s leadership.

Eligibility: Applicants should be SHAC student members in good standing and currently enrolled in a PhD program or equivalent, with research interests in the history of alchemy, chemistry, or adjacent fields.

Please apply by submitting a cover letter and curriculum vitae to studentrep@ambix.org (Alison McManus) and a.simmons@ucl.ac.uk (Anna Simmons). The cover letter should include a brief biography and a synopsis of your PhD research project, including the length of your program and your stage within it. Please include ideas on how you intend to shape the Graduate Network and potential workshop topics of interest to historians of alchemy and chemistry. The Society especially welcomes suggestions for workshops that cross disciplines, geographies, and time periods.

Application deadline: October 30

The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Professor Frank James (University College London) who will present

Trying to Return Europe to the Ancien Régime: Humphry Davy in Naples Chemically Recovering Ancient Literature, 1817-1820

This will be live on Thursday 29 September 2022 beginning at 5.00pm BST (6.00pm CEST, 12 noon EDT, 9.00am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.

As with the last seminar the Zoom link can be accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, via this following Eventbrite link.

Most previous on-line seminars can be found on the SHAC YouTube Channel.


Frank James

Chairman, SHAC

Synopsis:

Following the destruction of Herculaneum in 79CE after the eruption of Vesuvius, the library, now known as the Villa dei Papiri, remained untouched until the 1750s.Then around 2000 papyri, all in a very fragile state, were excavated. It was hoped that these rolls might contain many of the lost works of antiquity and much effort was put into unrolling them and transcribing the contents. Their fragility meant that work was painfully slow and from 1800 the Prince of Wales (later the Prince Regent and then George IV) began taking a strong personal interest in speeding up the process, boosted when the King of the Two Sicilies presented a few rolls to him in 1817. One of the members of the commission established with the task of unrolling, was the leading English chemist Humphry Davy. Davy, fresh from his success with the miners’ safety lamp, began to develop chemical methods of unrolling. His work met with sufficient success for the Prince Regent to personally command Davy to go to Naples to continue his work with the full support of the British state. In Italy Davy antagonised many of the savants in the Naples Archaeological Museum with his arrogance. Furthermore, once texts began to be transcribed, the thorny issue arose of who owned the intellectual property so produced. The most interesting feature to this whole story was the (unsuccessful) attempt, combining modern science and ancient literature, to restore something of the pre-1789 norms of courtly exchange between Hanoverian London and Bourbon Naples.

June 3-4, 2021  Registration link

Please note that the schedule reflects U.S. Eastern Time. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 3rd 

9:30-10:00 | INTRODUCTIONS 

10:00-10:50 | CONCEALING GENDERED KNOWLEDGE 

Natacha Klein Käfer, Private Spaces, Secret Practices: Gender and Concealment in  Alchemical Laboratories under Anna and August of Saxony 

Lara Tessaro, Beauty secrets: uncovering the estrogenic roots of Canadian cosmetic  labelling regulations, 1943-44 

Grace Poudrier and Lauren Richter, PFAS Ubiquity as Corporate Accomplishment

[break: 20 min] 

11:10-12:00 | ICONS AND CIPHERS 

Sergei Zotov, The biggest secret of Newton: alchemical iconography of Coronatio  naturae 

Marlis Hinckley, Secrecy in Pseudo-Lull: The Use of Letter Codes

Megan Piorko and Sarah Lang, Sloane MS 1902 Alchemical Cipher

12:00-1:00 | KEYNOTE, Nancy Langston

FRIDAY, JUNE 4th 

10:00-10:50 | PATENTS, PROFITS, AND INVENTIONS 

Andrew Meade McGee, Open Labs Versus Proprietary Methods: Secrecy,  Information Networks, and the Evolution of an Institutional Chemical Research  Infrastructure in the First Five Decades of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research 

Vyta Pivo, The Alchemy of Concrete: The Making and Unmaking of Material History 

Alison McManus, Who Invented Agent Orange?: Priority Disputes in the Aftermath  of Wartime Secrecy 

10:50-11:40 | RULES AND RESIDUES 

Jayson Porter, As if: Furtive Arsenic (As) from Extraction to Exposure 

Jack Klempay, Residues at the Limits of Chemical Knowledge: The Case of  Chlordecone Contamination in Martinique and Guadeloupe 

Colleen Lanier Christensen, Toxic Rules?: Standardized Chemical Knowledge and the  Limits of Regulatory Action 

[break: 20 min] 

12:00-1:00 | KEYNOTE: Michelle Murphy 

1:00-1:30 | CLOSING REMARKS

The SHAC Award Scheme for 2020 funded seven applicants.

Six Research Awards were made.

Georgiana Hedesan, Independent Scholar, research trip to the University of Glasgow to explore Alchemy in Antonio Neri’s manuscript Il Tesoro del Mondo (1598-1600).

Joris Mercelis, John Hopkins University, research trip to Rochester New York to study written and visual sources in the Kodak Historical Collection.

Luis Moreno-Martinez, University of Valencia, research trips for “A transnational approach to chemistry pedagogy through the biography of Antonio García-Banús (1888-1955).”

Silvia Perez Criado, PhD Student, University of Valencia, archival research for dissertation “DDT during Franco’s regime in Spain (1939-1977).”

Zoe Screti, PhD Student, University of Birmingham, archival research trip for dissertation “The Impact of the Reformation on the study of alchemy in Early Modern England.”

Robert Van Den Berg, Independent Scholar, image reproduction costs for biography of the Dutch Physical Chemist, J.H. van’t Hoff.

In addition, one Subject Development Award for conferences or the like was approved as follows: 

Peter Forshaw, University of Amsterdam, workshop on Rosicrucian and Masonic Alchemy.

It is with pleasure that I am able to announce that Lyke de Vries (PhD candidate, Radboud University Nijmegen) will take over my duties in maintaining the content of this website. Please address any information on events or other relevant matters you would like to see advertised here to her at contenteditor [AT] ambix.org.

The Council and SHAC as a whole are very grateful for her willingness to step forward in this regard, and we wish her all the best for her work in keeping the website up to date as well as for her PhD research.

Members are invited to note that the trustees annual report and annual accounts for 2015 have been posted online and may be accessed using the links on the About page.