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 James Delbourgo
Associate Professor: History of Science
and Atlantic WorldPh.D., Columbia, 2003 M.Phil., Cambridge, 1997At Rutgers since 2008
104 Van Dyck Hall
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Office Hours: Friday 3:30 - 5:00pm, and by appointment.
RESEARCH INTERESTSJames Delbourgo is a historian of early modern science and the Atlantic world. He previously taught at McGill University, Montreal, where he directed the program in History and Philosophy of Science. His interests range from physical science and experiment to natural history and travel, and the intersections between them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including topics such as history of the body, experimental apparatus, collecting, ethnography and race, and the movement of objects, specimens and techniques through global networks.
Recent/current projects include: electricity in early America; go-betweens and imperial knowledge networks; color, chemistry and empire in Guiana; science and the American Enlightenment; race as an enlightened science; the history of underwater exploration; and the relation between collecting and empire in the life and career of Hans Sloane. In relation to this last project, Delbourgo has advised on documentary and museum work for the BBC, the British Museum and Natural History Museum in London, and will curate an exhibit on Sloane, slavery and early modern scientific travel at the John Carter Brown Library in 2010, entitled “Slavery’s Scientific Objects.”
Delbourgo has co-organized several international conferences on the history of science and colonial history, at UCLA, USC and McGill. Three meetings are planned for 2010: “Collecting Things, Collecting People,” 29 January, Rutgers University, featuring Miguel Tamen, John Tresch and Ann Fabian; a conference on the life and career of Hans Sloane, 7-8 June, British Library, London, co-organized with Hal Cook (funded by the Wellcome Trust), where he will deliver a plenary lecture; and “In Kind: Species of Exchange in Early Modern Science and Philosophy ,” at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 18-19 June, co-organized with Justin Smith and Sachiko Kusukawa, and also featuring Peter Anstey, Daniel Carey, Alix Cooper, Staffan Müller-Wille, Brian Ogilvie, and Kelly Whitmer (for a description, click here ). He is also a Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis during 2009-2010.
He has reviewed and refereed for Isis; History of Science; British Journal of the History of Science; National Science Foundation; Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; American Historical Review; William and Mary Quarterly; Pickering and Chatto; University of Pennsylvania Press; American Philosophical Society; Modern Intellectual History; Journal of American History; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.
At Rutgers, Delbourgo offers undergraduate courses and graduate supervision in history of science and Atlantic world history, specifically: early modern science and themes in science and technology studies, especially in relation to colonialism, global and cross-cultural knowledges; natural science in North America from settlement to the Civil War, and the Caribbean; early modern travel, ethnography and race; collecting, museums and objects; and the Enlightenment in Atlantic perspective.
He has never personally handled an electric eel.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS- A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders : Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard, 2006).
- Science and Empire in the Atlantic World , co-editor with Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2008).
- The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence , 1770-1820, co-editor with Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts and Kapil Raj (Science History Publications, 2009).
- “Creole Sciences of Race,” co-editor with María-elena Martínez, forum for Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming).
- “Species of Mobility: Hans Sloane, Cacao and ‘Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate,’” under review.
- “Divers Objects: Collecting the World Under Water,” under review.
- “Exceeding the Age in Every Thing: Placing Sloane’s Objects,” Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 2 (Nov. 2009): invited essay on “epistemic boundaries.”
- “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities : Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” website of the British Museum (2007).
- “Science,” in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, second edition (Palgrave, 2009).
- “Fugitive Colours: Shamans’ Knowledge, Chemical Empire and Atlantic Revolutions,” in The Brokered World, ed. Schaffer, et al. (2009).
- “The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World,” in Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming).
- “Underwater-works : Voyages and Visions of the Submarine,” Endeavour 31 (Sept. 2007): 115-120.
- “Gardens of Life and Death: Slavery and the History of Science,” British Journal for the History of Science, forthcoming.
- “When the Printer Met the Virtuoso ,” Reviews in American History 36 (Dec. 2008): 485-492.
- “‘Very much in the Dark About Light’: Franklin, Lumières et Critiques,” Transatlantica: revue d’études américaines, under review.
- “Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment : The Transatlantic Career of Perkins’s Tractors,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (Oct. 2004): 643-684.
- “Political Electricity : The Occult Mechanism of Revolution,” Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 5:1 (Oct. 2004).
- “Leviathan and the Atlantic ,” History of Science 43 (Mar. 2005): 101-107.
AWARDS- Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Harvard University Press, for A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, 2006.
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant, “Beyond the New Atlantis,” 2005-2009.
SELECT FELLOWSHIPS- Rutgers University: Faculty Fellow, Center for Cultural Analysis, “Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences,” Fall 2009.
- University of Cambridge: Visiting Fellow, CRASSH, Lent 2008.
- University of Pennsylvania: Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center, 2001-2002.
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