HPST Previous Graduate Students

Alex Bay

I majored in Japanese history with a History of Science minor, working with Peter Duus and Tim Lenoir. My dissertation was on beriberi research and the construction of scientific knowledge in prewar Japan. After graduating in 2006, I began teaching at Chapman University, a small school in Orange County. During the 2008-2009 academic year, I pursued a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science post-doctoral fellowship, living in a rural, costal town several hours south of Tokyo. The picture provided is a bit of the cultural activities I was involved in when not writing my book, The Beriberi Debate: Medicine and Power in Prewar Japan.

Leslie Berlin

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She also writes the "Prototype" column on innovation for the New York Times. Ms. Berlin is the author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, a biography of Fairchild and Intel co-founder and integrated circuit co-inventor Robert Noyce. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Stanford.

Christophe Lécuyer

Christophe Lécuyer, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, earned his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. He taught at Stanford and the University of Virginia and is currently a principal economic analyst at the University of California. Lécuyer published extensively on the history of electronics, instrumentation, and high tech manufacturing. He is the author of Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970 (MIT Press, 2006) and (with David C. Brock) of Inventing the Digital World: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor from Startup to Microchip (MIT Press, forthcoming 2010).

John McCaskey

John spent twenty years in the computer business, including a successful stint at a software company he co-founded, before returning to academia in 2001. He received his PhD from the History Department in 2006. John now teaches part-time in the History and Philosophy of Science Program and in the Ethics in Society Program. His research and writing concern evolving conceptions of induction from the ancient world to the early twentieh century. He does a lot of work on Jacopo Zabarella, Francis Bacon and William Whewell. He and his wife live in Saratoga, California, part-time in New York City. For his latest teaching and research, see johnmccaskey.com

J.B. Shank

J.B. reports: I am in the process of getting all of my dissertation into book form. One part appeared in September 2008, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French EnlightenmentU of Chicago Press, and a prequel of sorts called Before Voltaire: Newton and the Making of Mathematical Physics in France, 1680-1715 is undergoing final revisions and will hopefully be out also from U. Chicago Press, in 2010. Otherwise I spent a year in 2005-2006 at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy (not Kentucky...) and started to work more during that year on sixteenth and seventeenth-century science, including a focus on Galileo and the Galileians. That has continued. I am organizing my new work around the title "Science before 'the Arts and Sciences,'" a theme which involves exploring the early modern disciplinary arrangements that joined subjects like mathematics, painting, music, and literature in ways that defy our modern, "Two Cultures" disciplinary divisions."

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