HPST Graduate Students

Lydia Barnett

I joined the Stanford History Department as a graduate student in 2004, after graduating from Oberlin College in 2003 with majors in History and Philosophy. My guiding research interest for the last few years has been the relationship between science and religion in early modern Europe. I've worked on a number of 17th and 18th century figures who proposed various ways of harmonizing natural knowledge and religious faith, including the British chemist Robert Boyle, the Swiss geologist Jean-André Deluc, and the British natural philosopher Thomas Burnet, who originated the 18th century genre of physico-theological writing known as 'theories of the earth'. My dissertation, provisionally titled "The Living Rock: Natural and Sacred Histories of the Earth, 1680-1740," takes Burnet as the starting point for an exploration of the multiple forces - literary and philosophical, cultural and religious, economic and political - which reconfigured the earth and its history as a subject of natural knowledge in the early Enlightenment. Future projects I'd love to pursue after the dissertation include: natural history, moral economy, and regimes of land use; the concept of authorship in early modern science, especially as it was deployed in scientific controversies; economies of fossil collecting and the unseen, lower-class labor which often went into the making of large and famous collections; and a long history of ideas about the earth's future in religion, popular culture and natural science.

Bradford Harris

I have always been fascinated with the history of science and technology. I believe that this particular historical field coheres many different academic disciplines and transcends many traditional historiographical boundaries (geographical, temporal, etc.), providing its students with a uniquely comprehensive view of human behavior through the ages. Since arriving at Stanford in the fall of 2008, I have focused my research on the historical relationship between materials engineering and design, business, and environmental and health concerns. My dissertation will explore the historical trajectory of plastics engineering, illuminating shifts in the major plastics feedstocks from bio-based materials through about 1940, to petroleum through the turn of the twenty-first century, with a current shift back to bio-based materials. Resource logistics, policy, and profit projections have all influenced these shifts, and my dissertation is likewise designed to appeal to historians and engineers, policymakers and businesspeople. Studying and working at Stanford has also afforded me the opportunity to enjoy the adventurous and cosmopolitan vibe of the Bay Area. Sailing, dancing, camping, and sports are some of my favorite activities in and around my home in San Francisco.

Greg Priest

I entered the PhD program in History at Stanford in the fall of 2011. I did my undergraduate work at Princeton and have a law degree and a masters in liberal arts from Stanford. Before entering the PhD program, I had careers as a corporate securities lawyer and as an entrepreneur and executive in software companies. My primary interests are in the history and philosophy of biology, particularly evolutionary biology and ecology. I am especially interested in the applications of principles of complex systems to biological processes. My current plan for my dissertation is an historical and philosophical analysis of the "tree of life" diagram from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I want to analyze how Darwin came upon the idea for the diagram, how he developed it, and how it can provide us a window through which we can better understand his thinking. I also argue that the diagram can give us a useful framework for analyzing a number of current questions in the philosophy of biology and in evolutionary biology more generally. I am married, have two children and live in San Francisco. I am an avid skier and cook.

Brianna Rego

I am focusing on late-20th century and contemporary history of science and science policy and for my dissertation I am excited to write an elemental history of science. This approach will combine aspects of biography, object history, science policy, and agnotology. Each of my chapters focuses on an element of the periodic table and together the stories of polonium in tobacco, arsenic in groundwater, and mercury in fish span the second half of the twentieth century. I am also a graduate student in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, working with the paleobiology research group on the end-Permian mass extinction and biotic recovery during the Triassic. When I'm not at Stanford I like to spend my time hiking and skiing in my home state of Idaho, and during the summers I perform as a figure skater with the Sun Valley Summer Ice Show. Visit Brianna's website at briannarego.com

Alexander Statman

I began the Stanford PhD program in the History of Science in 2009 after completing an undergraduate degree in History and Philosophy at Columbia University. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the importance of occult sciences to the 16th century study of cosmography, which encompassed the first extensive English writings about the Americas. At Stanford, I am continuing to investigate the history of early-modern European thought in its global context. When not reading, I have been a classical music radio DJ on WKCR FM New York. I like Go, maps, body-surfing, folksinging, and food of all kinds. I believe in rhetoric and the Renaissance dictum, "History is philosophy teaching by example."

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