JOHN R.R. CHRISTIE:
John Christie spent much of his career (1973-2006) in the Division of the History
and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, teaching history of science,
medicine and technology, and additional courses in the departments of History,
Philosophy and English. He is now a member of the Faculty of History, University
of Oxford, and in 2010 was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institut fur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin. His early research was on the socio-politiical,
institutional and intellectual history of science and medicine in the Scottish
Enlightenment. Latterly he has returned to Enlightenment studies, working on the
place of science and medicine in English Enlightened Dissent (Joseph Priestley,
John Jebb et.al.), on medico-chemical theories of animal heat in C18th. Scotland,
and on what happens to the Scottish medico-chemical curriculum in the Atlantic
world, as it is developed and altered in late colonial and revolutionary America. He
has also written on Paracelsan alchemical medicine, on science-literature relations
in the C18th. and late-C20th. centuries, historiography of science, Adam Smith’s
theory of language, and aspects of C18th. chemistry. He has supervised some two
dozen research degrees, including research on ancient Chinese medicine, C18th.
infanticide, and C18th. surgery and midwifery. Recent and up-coming seminar and
conference papers include:
Metropolitan Knowledge at the First Crisis of Empire. Oxford, Leeds, 2009.
A Socinian Enlightenment ? Sussex, 2010.
Phlogiston and the Caloric Aether in British Medico-Chemical Communities,
1750-1800. Berlin, 2010.
Space, Time and Mrs. Barbauld. Warwick, 2010.
The Time and the Place: Atlantic Chemistry and Medicine in the late Colonial and
Revolutionary Periods. Royal Society of London, 2010.
Philosophy Far-Fetched: Theory and Practice of Enquiry in Adam Smith. Berlin,
2010.
The Economy Enlightened? Innovation, Theory and the Dialectic of Value. Leeds,
2011.
The Politicisation of Experimental Sites in C18th. London. Oxford, 2011.