Welcome to the Website of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC), publisher of the scholarly journal Ambix.
Founded in 1935, SHAC has consistently maintained the highest standards of scholarship in all aspects of the history of alchemy and chemistry from early times to the present. The Society has a wide international membership from over thirty countries.
We hold meetings and webinars, offer scholarly prizes and grants, and publish the journal Ambix. The Society’s newsletter, Chemical Intelligence, is published twice a year. We have also established the Graduate Network to bring together postgraduate students in the field.
Keep up to date with the news and events of SHAC by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
You can watch our SHAC Online Seminars on YouTube here.
Please note that changes are processed manually and you will receive a confirmation email when our records have been updated. For any queries please find relevant contact information on https://www.ambix.org/contact-us/
a reminder about seminars, meetings, conferences and awards coming up in the next six months. We hope to see you online or in-person at some of them. Please scroll down to see everything!
1. Next SHAC Online Seminar – Thursday 21 November
The next on-line seminar will be given by Professor Matthew Daniel Eddy (University of Durham) who will present: ‘A Very Curious Subject’: Jane Ewbank, Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy in Late Georgian York
This will be live on Thursday, 21 November 2024, beginning at 5.00pm GMT (6.00pm CET, 12 noon ET, 9.00am PT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.
As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:
The seminar will be also accessible live on YouTube at
2. SHAC Special ICHC14 Award Scheme – Grants to support attendance at 14ICHC in Valencia, Spain, 11-14 June 2025
Applicants are invited to apply for grants under a Special Award Scheme from the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) to support attendance of early-career scholars and independent scholars at the 14th International Conference on the History of Chemistry in Valencia, Spain on 11 June to 14 June 2025. Awards of up to £400 will be made as a contribution towards the cost of travel, accommodation, and registration fees for those giving a paper at the conference. Early-career scholars are defined as post-graduate students (both masters and doctoral students) and those who have obtained a PhD since January 2015. For more information see: https://www.ambix.org/grants/
Deadline for applications is 28 February 2025
3. CHCMS Early Career Lecture Award – Call for nominations
For the 2025 edition, the awardee will be invited as guest to 14ICHC which is taking place in Valencia, Spain, 11-14 June 2025. The awardee will also commit to an interview to be shared through the CHCMS website and YouTube channel. The deadline for submitting nominations is 30 December 2024. The CHCMS Early Career Lecturer will be announced in February 2025. For more information see check the website: https://www.chcms.org/awards.html
4. SHAC Spring Meeting on the Biographies of Alchemists and Chemists
University College London on Saturday 29 March 2025
Offers of papers by 17 December 2024 – please see details at: https://www.ambix.org/2025-spring-meeting-on-the-biographies-of-alchemists-and-chemists/
5. SHAC Brock Award – Call for Nominations
Nominations by 30 June 2025 – please see details at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2024.2420472?src=exp-la
6. Call for Papers for SHAC Session on the Pesticide Chemical Industry in the 20th Century at ICHC 2025 (Valencia) https://www.ambix.org/call-for-papers-shac-session-on-the-pesticide-chemical-industry-in-the-20th-century-at-ichc-2025-valencia/?doing_wp_cron=1731068291.4582250118255615234375
Applicants are invited to apply for grants under a Special Award Scheme from the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) to support attendance of early-career scholars and independent scholars at the 14th International Conference on the History of Chemistry in Valencia, Spain on 11 June to 14 June 2025. Awards of up to £400 will be made as a contribution towards the cost of travel, accommodation, and registration fees for those giving a paper at the conference. Early-career scholars are defined as post-graduate students (both masters and doctoral students) and those who have obtained a PhD since January 2015. Given that the circumstances of independent scholars differ we are letting members ‘self-define’ and if there are any unclear cases it will be left to the discretion of the Awards Panel.
Applicants must be members of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry in good standing at the time of making an application and if successful through the period of the award. For more information and application forms please contact grants[at]ambix.org stating that you are applying for a grant to attend ICHC. SHAC has the expectation that awardees attend the whole conference, unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Details of how to join the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry can be found at https://www.ambix.org/subscription/ . Membership enquiries should be made to newjoiner[at]ambix.org
For further information on the conference – please visit:
Deadline for submitting conference proposals: 1 December 2024
Notification of acceptance: 5 February 2025
Provisional Programme: March 2025
Early Bird Registration: before 15 April 2025
Late Registration: 16 April 2025-15 May 2025
Final Programme: Late May 2025
NB: Deadlines may change depending on local arrangements.
The deadline for applications to this Award Scheme is 28 February 2025. It is expected that applicants will be advised of the outcome of their application in good time to register for early-bird conference fees which are available until 15 April 2025.
An activity report must be submitted at the end of the conference. This will usually be published in SHAC’s Chemical Intelligence Newsletter.
Please note that applying for a Special ICHC14 Award does not preclude applying to the usual SHAC Award Scheme for 2025. There is also a separate scheme from the Commission on the History of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences (CHCMS) for ICHC14. Applying for the SHAC Scheme does not preclude application for the CHCMS grant and vice versa. However, it should be noted that there are different eligibility requirements for the two schemes. Should an application be made to both schemes, the evaluation process will be co-ordinated between SHAC and CHCMS.
The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Professor Matthew Daniel Eddy (University of Durham) who will present:
‘A Very Curious Subject’: Jane Ewbank, Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy in Late Georgian York
This will be live on Thursday, 21 November 2024, beginning at 5.00pm GMT (6.00pm CET, 12 noon ET, 9.00am PT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.
As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:
‘A Very Curious Subject’: Jane Ewbank, Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy in Late Georgian York
Matthew Daniel Eddy
In September 1809 the artists Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin published a popular print depicting the audience which had recently attended the public experimental philosophy course given in London’s Surrey Institution. Every seat was full and the audience stared with anticipation at the lecturer. Notably, at least half of the attendees were women and girls. Though historians have observed that this was a common phenomenon at the time, studies which address the motivations and reactions of female attendees to the scientific ideas presented in such lectures have received less attention. This paper sheds new light on the subject by exploring the 1804 diary entries written by Jane Ewbank of York about the lectures of the traveling experimentalists Henry Moyes and Charles Sylvester. Ewbank’s notes represent one of the fullest known handwritten accounts of a woman who attended experimental lectures during the Regency period. The entries offer noteworthy examples of how Ewbank used scribal media to process and remember scientific information through recounting experiments from the lecture and related conversations that occurred later over tea with friends. Overall, the paper reveals how these and other instances in the diary offer insight into how women learned to connect experimental philosophy to topics ranging from climatology to vitalism.
The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) has decided to establish the Brock Award which honours Professor William ‘Bill’ Hodson Brock, one of the leading historians of chemistry of the last fifty years. For most of that time he was based at the University of Leicester, where he also directed the Victorian Studies Centre between 1966 and 1990. His Fontana History of Chemistry (1992) is a masterly summary of the field, while his biographies of Justus Liebig (1997) and of William Crookes (2008) continue to provide invaluable insights into the subtleties of nineteenth-century chemistry. In terms of SHAC, he served as editor of Ambix between 1968 and 1983 and then as Chair from 1993 to 2007. He contributed extensively to Ambix and served on SHAC Council for fifty years from 1967 until 2017. He has given extensive support to the history of chemistry community, always ready to share his expertise and insights and creating a welcoming environment for new scholars, particularly through his service to Ambix as editor and as a frequent reviewer.
The Brock Award consisting of £500 and an appropriate framed image will be awarded every three years beginning in 2025. This will dovetail with the Society’s other two awards, the Partington Prize for an unpublished essay on any area covered by SHAC written by an early career researcher to be next awarded in 2026 and the Morris Award given for outstanding achievement in the history of post-1945 chemistry or the history of the chemical industry to be awarded next in 2027.
The Brock Award will be for outstanding contributions in the fields of the history of alchemy and chemistry. The individual’s impact on the community of historians of alchemy and/or chemistry, through historical research, publication, support and encouragement of students and fellow researchers and contributions to the wider promulgation of the subject will be significant criteria for selection.
The awardee will be determined by a panel appointed by SHAC Council; serving members of Council are ineligible for the award. Nominations, including a cv and at least two letters of support, should be sent by 30 June 2025 to Professor Annette Lykknes: annette.lykknes[a]ntnu.no.
It is expected that the announcement of the first Brock Prize winner will be made in the autumn.
To be held on Saturday 29 March 2025 at University College London
on the subject of
The Biographies of Alchemists and Chemists.
Over the last few years a number of excellent biographies of alchemists and chemists have been published and more are in preparation. So, now seems an appropriate juncture to consider the genre and content of such biographies as well as how they relate to the evolving historiography. In addition to reflective papers devoted to specific people, offers on topics, such as, for example, collective biographies of alchemists and chemists, autobiographies, the market for such texts, and the value of the biographic genre and so on will be welcomed.
As 2025 marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of SHAC, there will be an associated round table at this meeting where members will be able to recollect their connection(s) with SHAC.
Offers of papers with a short description should be sent to the SHAC chair, Professor Frank James (frank.james[at]ucl.ac.uk), by 17 December 2024.
The Davy Notebooks Project is glad to announce that we have fully transcribed all 120 of Humphry Davy’s notebooks and sets of lecture notes, the vast majority of which are held at the Royal Institution in London, the rest in Kresen Kernow in Redruth. In total, including our pilot project that took place in 2019, our volunteers transcribed 13,121 pages. We are so very grateful for the 3,841 volunteers who have us in this work and who have also, helped us to write notes on the people, places, chemical elements and compounds and many other interesting things. You can now see the results of this work on Lancaster Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/.
The notebooks can be explored and searched, but we encourage you to let us know if you find anything amiss (e.g. a transcription or annotation error) and let us know using the feedback back form, which looks like two speech bubbles at the top right-hand side of the page.
We’d also like to invite you to the official launch of the Davy Notebooks Project, which will take place in-person and simultaneously online at Lancaster LitFest on Saturday 19th October, 6-7pm BST. Tickets (for both in-person and online) cost £5 and can be bought here. At this event, Prof Sharon Ruston will discuss some of the highlights of the project’s findings and it will be an opportunity for her to thank everyone who has been involved in the project since it began in 2019. Thank you to all who have been involved in this project since 2019!
