Sonja Brentjes (PhD Technical University Dresden, 1977) is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She has taught at universities in the two German states, Pakistan, the UK, Turkey and Spain and held research fellowships in the Soviet Union, Hungary, France, Germany, USA, the UK and Spain. Her research focuses on a contextualized history of science in Islamicate societies, mapmaking and early modern traveling between Europe, western Asia and North Africa. Three of her publications are: Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th Centuries Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge; Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS961, (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), “Teaching the Mathematical Sciences in Islamic Societies. Eighth–Seventeenth Centuries,” in Handbook on the History of Mathematics Education, edited by Alexander Karp and Gert Schubring, (New York: Springer, 2014, pp. 85–107); Sonja Brentjes, Alexander Fidora and Matthias M. Tischler, “Towards a New Approach to Medieval Cross-Cultural Exchanges,” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 1, 1 (2014), pp. 9–50.
Angélica Morales Sarabia is a Researcher in the History of Science Program at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Humanities at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). She is professor of History of Mexico at the Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales, UNAM. She has published several individual and collective articles and chapters in different books. Among her last works are: “The Culture of Peyote: Between Divination and Disease in Early Modern New Spain,” in Medical Cultures in the Early Modern Spanish Empire (1914); “Tres caminos posibles: una ausencia, una marca tipográfica y un evento fortuito. El peyote y otros hierbas en la materia médica siglos XVI–XVII,” in Geografía médica. Orillas y fronteras culturales de la medicina hispanoamericana (siglos XVI–XVII) (2014). Her latest book is in press: La consolidación de la botánica mexicana. Un viaje por la obra del naturalista José Ramírez (1852–1904) (2015).
José Pardo-Tomás is Senior Researcher in the Department of History of Science in the Institute “Milà i Fontanals” (CSIC, Barcelona, Spain). He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Padua (Italy), Humboldt (Berlin, Germany), Bordeaux and EHESS (France) and UNAM (México). His research focuses on the social and cultural history of medicine, natural history and scientific books in the early modern period. His books include: Ciencia y censura (CSIC, 1991), El tesoro natural de América (Nivola, 2002), El médico en la palestra (Marcial Pons, 2004) and Un lugar para la ciencia (Fundación Canaria Orotava, 2006), among others. He has co-edited the volumes Geografías médicas. Orillas y fronteras culturales de la medicina hispanoamericana, siglos XVI y XVII (UNAM, 2014, with Mauricio Sánchez Menchero) and Medical Cultures in the Early Modern Spanish Empire (Ashgate, 2014, with John Slater and Marialuz López Terrada).
Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo 2009, Research Associate, Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project, Harvard University; 2013, Affiliated Scholar, The Centre for Development and The Environment (SUM), University of Oslo; 2015, Research Partner, “Globalization of Knowledge” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). Research interests: epistemologies, ideas, languages and semiotics (literacy and writing systems) of the Americas. Selected publications: The Ritual Practice of Time: Philosophy and Sociopolitics of Mesoamerican Religious Calendars (Brill, 2013); “The Concept of Religion in Mesoamerican Languages,” NUMEN 54 (2007); “Concepts of Human Dignity in the Moral Philosophies of Indigenous People of the Americas & The Council of Valladolid (1550–1551): A European Disputation About the Human Dignity of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,” in Cambridge Handbook for Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Crossing Boundaries: Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra (Edition Open Access, 2016).
Emma Sallent Del Colombo is Professora Lectora in the Department of Fundamental Physics of the University of Barcelona and President of the Catalan Society for History of Science and Technology (SCHCT), at the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC). Her research is concerned with the history of vector calculus and mathematical physics in Italy in the early twentieth century, as well as the history of science and scientific institutions in Catalonia. She is currently working on Ulisse Aldrovandi’s relationship to Spain, and as a member of the project Cultura médica novohispana: circulación atlántica, recepción y apropiaciones, she is studying the chronicles of the mendicant orders of Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican friars in sixteenth-century New Spain as a source of natural history and medicine.
Mauricio Sánchez Menchero is a Researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Humanities (CEIICH) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a member of the National System of Researchers. He has a degree in Communications from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and completed his Masters and PhD studies in the history of social communication at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Mauricio Sánchez teaches cultural history to bachelor and postgraduate research students at the UNAM. He is author of the book El corazón de los libros (UNAM, 2012), and editor of the books: Geografías Médicas (UNAM, 2013) and La circulación del conocimiento en imágenes (UNAM, 2014). He also published the chapter “From where they are now to whence they came from: news about health and disease in New Spain (1550–1615),” in J. Slater (ed.) Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (Ashgate, 2014). He is currently working on the research project “The build and circulation of knowledge of the Boston Society of Natural History” (UNAM).
Nuria Valverde Pérez is Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa (México). From 2005 to 2008, she was a researcher at the Center for Human and Social Sciences at the Spanish National Research Council. She was also a visiting researcher at the Department of History of Science at Harvard University in 2007. Among her works are Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics (2005), and Space Production and Spanish Imperial Geopolitics (2008), both co-authored with A. Lafuente; Actos de precisión. Instrumentos científicos, opinión pública y economía moral en la ilustración española (2007) and Un mundo en equilibrio. Jorge Juan; 1713–1773 (2012). Her paper “Small Parts: Crisóstomo Martínez (1638–1694), Bone Histology and the Visual Making of Body Wholeness” (2009) was awarded the Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize by the History of Science Society in 2011. Currently, she is doing research on visual technologies and systemic imagination, as well as on standardization and practices in the development of EEGs in the USA and Mexico.
Timothy Walker (B.A., Hiram College, 1986; M.A., PhD, Boston University, 2001) is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. At UMD, he serves as Fulbright Program Advisor (faculty and students); Associate Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture (2007–2009) and Director of Tagus Press; a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Portuguese Studies; and an affiliated faculty member of the Center of Indian Studies and Program in Women’s Studies. Walker is also an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar (CHAM); Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. From 1994 to 2003, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon. During Fall Term 2010 Walker was a visiting professor at Brown University. Walker is the recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship to Portugal (1996–1997), a doctoral research fellowship from the Portuguese Camões Institute (1995–1996), and a NEH-funded American Institute for Indian Studies Grant for post-doctoral work in India (2000–2002).
Helge Wendt is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is associated with the project “Globalization of Knowledge.” He received his PhD from the University of Mannheim, where he taught early modern history. His research focuses on the history of Christian missions in different colonial contexts, the history and historiography of globalization and the global history of coal. He currently works on the analytic turn of mechanics in the eighteenth century, funded by the Collaborative Research Center “Transformations of Antiquity.” Wendt published a book on the global history of colonial missions Die missionarische Gesellschaft (Franz Steiner, 2011) and papers on different aspects of colonial mission history. He is co-editor of The History of Physics in Cuba (Springer, 2014). In his current book project, he studies the global history of knowledge of black coal (seventeenth to nineteenth century).