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

Bradford Harris entered Stanford's PhD program in the history and philosophy of science and technology in the fall of 2008. He received his undergraduate degree in English and History from Duke University in 2007, and then spent a year working at the South Carolina Aquarium performing shows and teaching K-12 classes in science before coming to Stanford. Brad grew up in Maine, where he developed a passion for winter camping and summers on Sebago Lake. If you listen carefully, you may hear the gentle notes of Brad's Spanish guitar floating through certain of Stanford's many outdoor corridors. He is fond of conversations over a beer, so never hesitate to ask Brad to join you for one.

Jenny Pegg

"As to the fable that there are Antipodes," St. Augustine wrote in the fifth century, "that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth... men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible."

I am driven to seek our Antipodes - to pursue awareness of how the ideas and visions of our present are both helped and hindered by the knowledge and assumptions we inherit from our past - to discover ground credible, un-credible, and incredible. I'm drawn to topics in which humanity directly confronts fundamental questions of existence, questions asked in one form or another by men and women in the past, questions that remain with us, often in new forms, in the present. They echo through centuries, even millennia. What do we know of the universe? How do we understand matter, space, and time? What is man in relation to other life? What is the self, the mind and/or (a more recent development) the brain?

I am also interested in the interaction between natural philosophical, and later scientific, knowledge and law, politics and power.

I graduated from Harvard University in 2004 with a degree in astrophysics. Thereafter, I worked in neuroscience research for four years before commencing graduate studies in 2008.

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

Peder Roberts

I came to Stanford from the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia, back in 2004. I hope to soon become Robert Proctor's first completed PhD advisee! My dissertation focuses on the way science has became the dominant form of legitimate activity in the Antarctic. In a sense, it's a story about how states came to decide that Antarctic science was something worth supporting rather than about how scientists realized Antarctica was interesting -- though of course, you can never completely separate those two questions. With all the focus today about natural resource exploitation and governance in the polar regions, I feel strongly that historical insights can be useful. Climate change has been used as a justification for international research in the Antarctic since the 1940s -- back when it had positive connotations and was thought to be a natural cycle. And at a time when 'scientific whaling' is widely seen as an oxymoron, it's interesting to recall that for many years it was anything but. My research has taken me to Norway, Sweden, Britain, and Australia, but nothing compares to spring in northern California!

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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