Instruments: Mental and Material (HAPSAT Graduate Student Conference)

On *Sunday April 25*, HAPSAT, the Graduate Student Society at the
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at Technology at the
University of Toronto, will host its sixth annual conference,
*Instruments: Mental and Material.*

Scientific instruments have emerged as a central theme in the history
and philosophy of science and in science and technology studies. In
*Leviathan and the Air Pump*, Shapin and Schaffer cite instruments,
together with writing style and modest witnessing, as the technologies

Curious Specimens: Enlightenment Objects, Collections, Narratives

Curious Specimens will take place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, April 15-17, 2010. This conference takes its starting point from two major exhibitions on enlightenment collecting: Walpole and Strawberry Hill (YCBA & V&A 2009-10) and Mrs Delany’s Circle and the Art of Natural History (YCBA & John Soane’s Museum, 2009-10). The fresh finds emerging from these two major curatorial projects will inform new ways of thinking about eighteenth-century practices of collecting.

Reading Artifacts - Canada Science and Technology Museum

READING ARTIFACTS
Summer Institute in Material Culture Research

Presented by:
Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation
Collection and Research Branch and Conservation Services

Our 2009 Summer Institute broke new ground on how to approach history
through intense study of artefacts by bringing together international
experts and participants from diverse backgrounds. This years SI will
use the same formula to expose you to a unique experience and change
the way you appreciate objects and material culture.

Yesterday’s Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things

Autopsies Research Project Study Day

Friday, 4 June 2010

University College London (UCL)

The Autopsies Project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth
century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media - the
typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example - the arrival of the
twenty-first century has brought with it the disappearance of many public
and private objects that only recently seemed essential to ‘modern life.’

Responding to recent work in cultural history, spatial studies, and 'thing