INVITED PAPERS
“A Library without Books: Handling Nature in the Museum of Johann Daniel Major,” Early Modern Collections in Use, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, September, 2017 (upcoming)
Title TBA, “Ingenuity in the Making,” Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge, May, 2017 (upcoming)
“Cornelis Drebbel among the Autodidacts of Holland,” Stevin Inside Out, Amsterdam, December, 2017 (upcoming)
“Mountebanks and the Marketplace,” Change and Exchange, Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, April, 2016
“The Science of Wishing: Francis Bacon and the Magical Optative,” History and Philosophy of Science Departmental Seminar, University of Cambridge, April, 2016
“Francis Bacon and the Science of Wishing,” History of Science Departmental Seminar, Harvard, February, 2016
“Depicting the Air,” Depicting the Invisible, Princeton University, February, 2016
“Errors and Non-Entities: Browne and Hartlib between Discourse and Catalog,” Truth and Error in early modern Science: Thomas Browne and his World, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, January, 2016
Respondent for workshop, Working with Paper, Max Planck Institute, January, 2016 Berlin (upcoming
“The World of Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Transnational Science and Dutch Historiography,” Low Countries Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, May, 2015
“Missing Links: Desiderata and Deep Time,” Eighteenth-Century Studies Symposium, Newberry Library, June, 2014
“Unknown Worlds: Categorizing the Wish Lists of Georg Hieronymus Welsch (1624-1677),” Worlds of Learning: Early Modern Debates over Taxonomies of Knowledge, Huntington Library, October, 2013
“Francis Bacon and the Celebrity of Magic,” The Alphabet of Nature and the Idols of the Market; Bacon on Languages, Natural and Human, Warburg Institute, London, June, 2013
“Advancement of Epistemic Empire,” Keynote, Inauguration of the Research Center Fundamente der Moderne, Ludwig Maximilans Universität, Munich, December, 2012
“The New World of Sciences,” Early Modern History Master Seminar, Ludwig Maximilans Universität, Munich, December, 2012
“Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphium: The Search for Ancient Species in early modern Empires,” Worlds of Paper: Writing Natural History from Gessner to Darwin, Linnean Society, London, January, 2012
“Situating Thermometers: The Instrumentum Drebilianum, Invention Claims, and Intellectual Geography,” Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700, University of Oxford, September, 2011
“Pliny’s Lost Glass: The Search for Flexible Glass and the formation of Research Agendas in Early Modern Europe,” International Conference on the Chemistry of Glasses, University of Oxford, September, 2011
“Central European ‘Baconians’ or, Query Lists for Rosicrucians,” Fellows’ Colloquium, Gotha Research Center for Cultural and Social Studies, August, 2011
“Natural Prudence: Science and Politics in Bacon Reconsidered,” Francis Bacon and the Materiality of the Appetites, Warburg Institute, London, June, 2011
“The Desiderata List: Collecting the Future in the Early Modern Past, Warburg Institute Director’s Seminar, ” June, 2010
“Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Artisan and Philosopher” EMPHASIS Seminar, University College, London, May, 2010
“Exporting Wonders: Cornelis Drebbel’s (1572-1633) International Fame between Pansophic Philosophy and Competitive Politics” Fellows’ Seminar, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, July, 2009
“Perfective Artists: The Engraving, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy of Drebbel and Goltzius,” Harvard Humanities Center, December, 2008
“Artificial Suns from Drebbel to Balduin and the Discovery of Phosphorus” Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lunch Talk, Philadelphia, March, 2008
CONFERENCE AND MEETING PAPERS
“Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693) and the Science of the Kunstkammer,” Renaissance Society of America,
“What did it mean to be a Baconian? The Fate of Desiderata in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science Society, Atlanta, November 2016
“The Reason of State and Scientific Desire in the Wish Lists of Robert Child, Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle,” Scientiae, Oxford, July, 2016
“Things Lost and Things Found in Kynaston’s Chaucer,” Renaissance Society of America, Boston April, 2016
“Restoration as Discovery: The Lost Things as Targets of Renaissance Experiment,” Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Vancouver, Canada, October 2015
“Scarlet Letters: The Mayerne Papers within the Royal Society Archives,” Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British
Scientific and Medical Archives, Royal Society, London, June 2015
“Gerbier and the Secrets of Nature,” A Collector of Secrets. Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663) in cultural diplomacy and the arts, Victoria and Albert Museum, London June 2015
“Collecting Adepts: Joachim Morsius, the Alchemical Republic, and early modern Social Media,” History of Science Society, Chicago, November, 2014
“The Authority of the early modern scientific Amateur,” Renaissance Society of America, New York, March, 2014
“Scarlet Letters: The Experimental Research of Art in the Early Royal Society,” History of Science Society, Boston, November, 2013
“Authors of the Unknown: From Visible Systems to the Research Niche,” What is a Scientific Author?, Harvard University, May, 2013
“Life in the Blood: Johann Ernst Burggrav’s Lamp of Life and Death,” Renaissance Society of America, San Diego, April, 2013
“Transformative Knowledge: Alchemical Processes, Personae, and Authorial Practices in Economic Thought from Jakob Bornitz (1560-1625) to Wilhelm von Schröder (1640-1688),” The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Wolfenbüttel Group for Baroque Research, Duke August Library, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, August, 2012
“The Three Societies: An Alchemical Agenda in the Early Oxford, Royal, and Dublin Societies,” Three Societies: Joint meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Science Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July, 2012
“Bornitz’s Politics as an Alchemical Art,” Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, Vancouver, B.C., April, 2012
“Learned Charlatans: The End of the Renaissance in the History of Letters,” Renaissance Society of America, Washington DC, March, 2012
“Sharp-sighted Sociability: Visual Acuity and Miniaturization in the Stammbuch,” Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany, Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, Duke University, March, 2012
“Projecting New Worlds in Europe,” New World of Projects, 1550-1750, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, June, 2012
“Optatives and the Epistemic Potential of Impossibilities,” British Society for the History of Science, Exeter, July, 2011
“The Murder of Invention,” The Nature of Invention in Early Modern Europe, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, April, 2011
“Air-Conditioning India: Impossible Projects as Global Strategies,” Renaissance Society of America, Montreal, March, 2011
Research Presentation in the Folger Library Spring Faculty Weekend Seminar, Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, Washington, D.C. taught by Ann Blair (Harvard), February 2011
“Art, Nature, and Alchemy in Early Seventeenth-Century Economic Thought,” German Studies Association, Montreal, October, 2010
“Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz,” Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560–1670, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, October, 2010
“On the Subtlety of Things: Connoisseurship and Political Engagement in Early Modern Europe,”Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: Visual, Scientific, Literary and Musical Formations, Vancouver, B.C., September, 2010
“Perfective Views of Progress in Politics (1575-1625),” Alchemy and Economy: Circulations of Value in Early Modern Europe, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, September, 2010
“The Seventeenth-Century Journal, Learned Machiavellism, and the Republic of Letters,” Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge, and Forms, Royal Society, London, July, 2010
“Accounting for Invention: Book-Keeping and the History of the Wish-List,”Material Cultures, University of Edinburgh, July, 2010
“Mining Tacitus: Bacon, Bornitz, Bernegger and the Technologies of State,” Nature’s Publics: The Making of Publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill, Montreal, March, 2010
“Philosophizing Projectors and Projecting Philosophers: The Late Projects of Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633),” History of Science Society, Phoenix, November, 2009
“Ancients Reborn: Reading the Classics within the Vernaculars of Drebbel and Jonson,” Bilingual Europe: Latin and Vernacular Cultures, ca. 1300-1800, Amsterdam, September, 2009
“Forms of Internationality: the Minor Genres across Early Modern Europe,” Richard Helgerson and Making Publics: A Workshop, Montreal, August, 2009
“The Desiderata List: Collecting the Future in the Early Modern Past,” History of Science Society, Pittsburgh, November, 2008
“The Artisan and the Natural Philosophers: Interpreting Cornelis Drebbel’s On the Nature of the Elements,” Chymia: Science and Nature in Early Modern Europe (1450-1750), Madrid, September, 2008
“An Ancient Reborn: Reading On the Nature of the Elements in Early Modern Europe,” Three Societies Conference (British Society for the History of Science, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Science Society), Oxford, July, 2008
“Fame and the Making of Modernity in Central Europe,” Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History, German Historical Institute, Berlin, May, 2008
“Moving Pictures: Circulating Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile,” Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, April, 2008
“Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Artisan and Natural Philosopher,” History of Science Society, Arlington, November, 2007
“Circles of Invention: Cornelis Drebbel and the Lovers of Art,” Clark Library, “Circles of Sociability” Conference, Los Angeles, October, 2007
“Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633) as Alchemical Authority in Central Europe,” German Studies Association, San Diego, October, 2007
“Contemplating the Album Amicorum Drawing: Joachim Morsius and the Production of Knowledge,”International Association of Word and Image Studies Focus Conference: Experience as Manner: Humanists as Draftsmen in Early Modern Europe, Berlin, October, 2006