Owing to the continuing crisis, meetings of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry have had to be suspended for the foreseeable future. We have therefore decided to run a series of hour-long on-line Zoom seminars on the history of alchemy and chemistry beginning on 21 July at 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour. Anyone, member of SHAC or not, may register to attend the seminar by e-mailing meetings@ambix.org; they will be sent a link to the seminar the day before. (If having registered you do not receive a link the day before please check your junk folder’).

The first speaker, to mark the publication of Humphry Davy’s letters by OUP, will be Tim Fulford, Professor of English at De Montfort University.

“The greatest chemist that has ever appeared?”: Humphry Davy as Revealed in His Correspondence

The publication in June this year of Davy’s Collected Correspondence gives us many new perspectives on Davy himself and on the culture of scientific enquiry in which his work was produced and consumed.  In this talk, Tim Fulford, one of the editors, will present a selection of the letters and discuss, for example, the changing role of patronage, the cultivation of reputation, the institutionalisation of chemical investigation, the role of correspondence networks, relationships between poetic and scientific experimentation, and Davy’s interactions with Ampère, Banks, Beddoes, Berzelius, Dalton, Faraday and Watt.

Oxford University Press has just published The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, advisory eds. Jan Golinski, Frank James and the late David Knight, with the assistance of Andrew Lacey. Eleven years in the making, SHAC contributed a couple of small grants to the project, this is the first scholarly edition of the correspondence of a man many literary critics know as the friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Walter Scott.  He was regarded as the greatest chemist ever, having used the Voltaic pile to decompound substances and reveal new elements—including potassium, sodium, chlorine and iodine—demonstrating the forces that hold matter together to be electrochemical.   He experimented with nitrous oxide, designed a mine safety lamp, and became the most charismatic lecturer of the era.  He knew James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, John Dalton, Henry Mackenzie, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Banks, William Godwin, Lord Byron, Germaine de Staël, John Opie, William and Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.  He was a controversial President of the Royal Society. His protégés were Michael Faraday and John Herschel. He was a pioneering geologist; he wrote a lot of poetry—mostly landscape verse influenced by his intimate knowledge of Wordsworth’s, Southey’s and Coleridge’s poems (he had helped edit the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and Thalaba the Destroyer).   

The Chairman of SHAC, Professor Frank A.L.J. James, has written two open letters to Sir Duncan Wingham regarding open access. The letters can be read by clicking on the following links:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=22866
and https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=29243

A message sent through Mersenne that suggests possible future actions can be found here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=34745

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2020 Partington Prize is Dr Mike A. Zuber of the University of Queensland for his article “Alchemical Promise, the Fraud Narrative, and the History of Science from Below: A German Adept’s Encounter with Robert Boyle and Ambrose Godfrey.”

Dr Mike A. Zuber is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Queensland. He obtained his doctorate with distinction at the University of Amsterdam in 2017 and subsequently received grant funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a postdoc project based at the University of Oxford. He has published on the scientific, religious, and intellectual history of the seventeenth century, with particular expertise in German-speaking contexts.

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry established the Partington Prize in memory of Professor James Riddick Partington, the Society’s first Chairman. It is awarded every three years for an original and unpublished essay on any aspect of the history of alchemy or chemistry. The prize-winning article will appear in the Society’s journal, Ambix, in due course.

This summer, the Roger Bacon Research Society is hosting a reading group of Bacon’s Compendium of the Study of Philosophy. The text is in English, and will be provided to all who wish to join the group. The meeting on 1 May will be used as a planning session, and the group will pick a date and time that works best for the majority of people interested during that meeting.

More info about the reading group can be found here.

Applications are invited for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD studentship at University College London and the Royal Society on the funding of science in London in the period 1660-1760, using materials within the Royal Society’s archives. The student will be based at the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at UCL, and will start in September 2020. The named supervisors for this project are: Simon Werrett (STS, UCL) and Keith Moore (Royal Society).

For this project the student will use the little-examined financial and property records of the Royal Society to explore the material and financial culture of science in London between 1660 and 1760. This will allow the student to contemplate the Society’s ground-level domestic history, from founder gatherings at Fellows’ houses, to the institutional residence at Gresham College (1660-1710), the stately home of Arundel House (1666-1673) and to the private houses at Crane Court (1710-1778). Apart from the doctorate itself, it is hoped that the studentship will make a genuine contribution to the digital humanities: potentially, by digital rendering of manuscripts, training the student on managing the disparate elements (scanning, metadata) to make the archives concerned widely available online; or, more excitingly, to use the archival data in the recreation one of the Society’s historical interiors.

Applicants are expected to hold a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline from a UK university, an overseas qualification of an equivalent standard, or equivalent professional experience.

The studentship is part of the Collaborative Doctoral Programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through a consortium including the Science Museum Group. Studentships are fully funded for 45 months (3.75 years) with potential to be extended for another 3 months. 3 to 6 months of the funded period should be spent on professional development and not on research for the thesis.

The doctoral training grant provides a living stipend and tuition fees at UKRI rates and is subject to standard AHRC eligibility, rules, and guidance for the research students whom they fund and support. AHRC’s minimum stipend rate and indicative fees rate for 2020/21 are detailed on the UKRI website (https://www.ukri.org/skills/funding-for-research-training/).

The major features of CDP awards are to enable collaboration between a Higher Education Institution and a museum, library, archive, or heritage organisation (in this case UCL and the Royal Society); and to enable the student to acquire new skills within a research-led, professional environment. There is the potential for an additional doctoral training grant, subject to standard AHRC eligibility, rules, and guidance for the research students whom they fund and support. This studentship also offers research expenses (including some support for travel from the Royal Society), digital humanities and other training, and working space at the institutions.

Informal inquiries are welcome. Please contact Prof. Simon Werrett if you have further questions.

Applicants should send: i) a CV and ii) a statement of interest (maximum 2 pages) by email to Professor Simon Werrett (s.werrett@ucl.ac.uk) by May 15th 2020. 17:00 GMT

Interview for the studentship will take place on 29 MAY 2020.
More info can be found here.

On Thursday 5 March, the Apothecaries’ Hall organises a conference on women in history, science and art.

Speakers include; Briony Hudson, Frances Reed, Dr Catherine James, Dr Amy Erickson, Maria Thomas, Sybil H. Mair, Nidhi Gupta, Bev Thomas, Jo Durrant, Dr Jackie Bell, Natasha McEnroe, Professor Jane Anderson.

More information can be found here.