Paola Bertucci

Candidate statement

Paola Bertucci is Associate Professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. She has a secondary appointment in History of Medicine at the School of Medicine and serves as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Division of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on marginalized figures and practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the context of scientific and artisanal knowledge. She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), which looks at the Enlightenment from the perspective of learned artisans and argues for the centrality of the mechanical arts in French colonial and commercial projects. Artisanal Enlightenment was awarded the 2019 Louis Gottschalk from ASECS. Her new book, In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2023. The book takes the Italian journey of the French physicist abbé Nollet in 1749 to explore the relationship between the manipulation of information and the making of scientific careers. She is the recipient of the 2015 Clifford prize and the 2016 Margaret Rossiter prize from the History of Science Society. She served in the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies and in the Clifford and Gottschalk committees.

Paola has a strong interest in bringing innovative scholarly perspectives to broader audiences in museum exhibitions. She designed two permanent galleries in the Galileo Museum in Florence (The Spectacle of Science and Science at Home). At Yale, she is working on the first History of Science and Technology Gallery (that will open in the Peabody Museum in 2024) and is the co-curator of Crafting Worldviews. Art and Science in Europe, 1500-1800 (Yale University Art Gallery, February 17-June 25, 2023) She earned her DPhil at Oxford and, before her appointment at Yale, she carried out postdoctoral work in Bologna, Florence, Paris, Stanford, and Berkeley. Her international experiences, together with her curatorial activities, have made her particularly appreciative of scholarship and initiatives that cross disciplinary or intellectual boundaries. Her own research, which mostly focuses on Europe, takes inspiration from studies of cross-cultural encounters and indigenous knowledge outside of Europe. She hopes to bring this multicultural approach to ASECS, promoting initiatives aimed at expanding and diversifying membership and outreach. She believes that, as a time of foundational transformations at a global scale, the eighteenth century offers precious opportunities to better understand the roots of systemic injustice and of critical thinking. She is committed to listening and working with members on strategies for making ASECS a space for effecting positive change, within and beyond academia. She is eager for ASECS to have a stronger media and social media presence, to establish collaborations with other societies or entities on common objectives/themes/events, to develop more inclusive practices to encourage participation and to support members’ creative experimentation.