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Jan Golinski

PROFESSOR
Phone: (603) 862-3789
Office: History, Horton Social Science Center Rm 403, Durham, NH 03824

Jan Golinski is a professor in the Department of History and the Humanities Program. He came to UNH in 1990, after completing a Ph.D. at the University of Leeds and a postdoctoral fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. He teaches courses on the history of science since the Renaissance, European intellectual history, and historiography.

Professor Golinski's research focus is on the sciences of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He is the author of three books: Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2005); and British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007). He also edited, with William Clark and Simon Schaffer, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1999). He is currently working on a biographical study of the English chemist Humphry Davy, and on the sciences of the environment in the era of Romanticism.

Professor Golinski has held distinguished fellowships at the Huntington Library (California) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia); he has also been a visiting fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science at MIT, at the University of Wisconsin, and at the Universities of Cambridge and Salford in the United Kingdom. At UNH, he has been recognized by the Outstanding Faculty Award (Associate Professor) in 1998, and the Lindberg Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research in the College of Liberal Arts in 2012.

Courses Taught

  • HIST 440G: Honors/Revolutions in Science
  • HIST 500: Intro to Historical Thinking
  • HIST 521: Origins of Modern Science
  • HIST 522: Science in the Modern World
  • HIST 654/854: Topics in History of Science
  • HIST 774/874: Historiography
  • HUMA 526: Humanities and Science

Education

  • Ph.D., History of Science, University of Leeds
  • M.A., Natural Sciences, Cambridge University
  • B.A., Natural Sciences, Cambridge University

Research Interests

  • 18th century enlightenment
  • History
  • History of science, especially chemistry and meteorology
  • Intellectual History

Selected Publications