Dear BSHS members,
This is my first opportunity to write to the BSHS community in my new role as president. I’m really looking forward to building on the fantastic work of my predecessors, particularly Charlotte Sleigh, who has done such a wonderful job in developing new initiatives and broadening the appeal and range of what we do.
The annual conference in Belfast was a huge success. It was our first in-person meeting of this kind for longer than I care to say, and everyone who attended appreciated the chance to meet old friends and make new ones. The standard of the papers was outstanding, and I was especially struck by the range and quality of work being done by postdocs and postgraduates. It’s often said that no one attends conferences for the papers, but at Belfast this just wasn’t the case. Huge thanks go to the brilliant local organisers and to Sam Robinson, chair of the committee on conferences.
A highlight of the Belfast meeting was the lecture on ‘The Disabled Gaze in the History of Science’ by Jaipreet Virdi on her Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History, winner of the 2021 Hughes Prize for the best book in history of science published in English for a non-specialist audience. Jaipreet’s superb presentation was accompanied by BSL and ISL interpreters. We also announced the award of the 2022 Pickstone Prize for the best book in our field to Pratik Chakrabarti’s Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity, and the Singer Prize for the best early-career essay to Luísa Reis Castro (Dornsife), ‘Yellow Fever Campaigns and their Afterlives: Mosquitoes, Race, and Politics in Brazilian Science’. Many congratulations to them all, and thanks to the judges who devoted so many hours to reading all the submissions.
Concerns about access and sustainability have led the Society to agree that in future our annual meetings should alternate between in-person and online formats. Each of these has distinct advantages, and in 2023 we’ll be organizing a major international digital history of science festival, along the lines of the event held so memorably in 2020. So make sure to put the dates 3-7 July 2023 in your diary. Also, in order for BSHS in-person annual meetings to alternate in future with the biannual meetings of the European Society for the History of Science, our conferences for summer 2024 and 2025 will both be face-to-face. We’ll have updates as soon as they are available.
In the meantime, Council is keen to co-sponsor other meetings of general interest during the coming year; we can provide a contribution towards funding and national publicity for events that you are already planning. Watch out for announcements of our conference funding scheme. I’d especially welcome activities (like those at the Science Museum last spring) that involve those of us working in libraries, museums and collections.
As many of you will know, access to the physical collections of the Science Museum has been restricted for some time due to the huge task of moving objects from Blythe House to the National Collections Centre (NCC) near Swindon. In answer to a BSHS member’s query, Tim Boon provided a report on the status of the move. The headline news is that the NCC will be open for researchers from April 2024. A study room will be available for individual object research as well as group work, seminars, and other meetings; handling by researchers with training will be possible in most cases; and an enhanced collection enquiries service from 2024 will also enable researchers to make requests for information about specific objects, including viewing smaller objects using a visualizer, and virtual tours of parts of the collection. Separately from the move, the Science Museum staff are keen to encourage online access, and significantly more of the collection than used to be the case is already findable at https://collection.
At our council meeting last weekend, we thanked Francis Newman for his numerous contributions to managing our social media accounts. In order to consolidate our outreach and communication, Alexander Stöger will be taking over our twitter account. He has already been doing a superb job in updating and streamlining our website, and developing a new YouTube presence for the Society.
We also thanked Trish Hatton for her many years of extraordinary service as editorial assistant for our journals. Anyone (like me) who has published in the BHJS or Themes during the past two decades knows how much of the quality of our publications has been ensured by her wonderful work.
Finally, a word about membership. The BSHS already does a remarkable number of things, but we could do a lot more if we were larger. We all know these are difficult times for just about everyone. For that reason, much of what we offer is free to view. This includes everything from attendance at our online meetings to the contents of the annual CUP volume Themes—and we would like to keep it that way. We also want to do even more to support postgraduates and early career scholars. So do encourage anyone you know who is not a member to join.
For those of you who teach, it’s also the ideal time to encourage students to join, so please distribute the message here (first sent out by Charlotte last year) as widely as you can.
I hope you all have a good year. Get in touch with me if you have ideas, issues or are interested in contributing to our activities.
All best wishes
Jim Secord (BSHS President)