Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Hannah Marcus, a professor in Harvard’s History of Science Department, and the new Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. I was interested in learning about her journey into history and the history of science, and how she’s bringing her love of the study of the past to new audiences through her new role. Here she is. Hannah Marcus, welcome to the show.
Hannah Marcus 01:04
Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 01:10
You originally fell in love with archives in Italy, which is just so romantic. Tell me that story, and what was it about archives that sent you on this lifelong journey?
Hannah Marcus 01:23
When I was an undergraduate, I studied abroad at the University of Bologna for a whole year. I’d taken a year of Italian before I started, so I could talk a tiny bit about some books, and I couldn’t order food when I first got there. And I learned. I lived with Italians. I took classes in Italian. I understood very little of what was going on in them for about five months, and then suddenly, I was dreaming in Italian. I was living in a new language. And I got an email from the History Department. I was a history major at the University of Pennsylvania. I got an email from the department asking why don’t you write a senior thesis, and I was like, “Well, I’d write a senior thesis. That sounds interesting.” And at Penn, at the time, it was a three-semester project so even though I was abroad, I started going around and thinking about what that might entail, and talking to professors at the University of Bologna about the kinds of things that interested me. I told them I was interested in the history of religion, especially the history of the Reformation in Italy. I was interested in the history of science, and a professor there very kindly pointed me toward the archives of a 16th-century naturalist, botanist, philosopher, physician named Ulisse Aldrovandi. So, I dutifully went over to the archives and got permission to start going through his papers as archival records, and I loved it. I was like, “This is it. This is what I want to do.” And in fact, it was summer at that point by the time I like decided that I was going to be working on Aldrovandi, to some extent, and all of my friends were taking off with their Italian boyfriends to the beaches in Sardinia, and I was in the archive at the University of Bologna at The Palazzo Pitti, and it was not air-conditioned and I was so happy. I was just so, so happy. I loved getting to be able to read primary source documents, like read the stuff of the past, from those physical documents. It felt really different to me to be working on it, not after it had been edited and printed and circulated in a modern edition, but to be able to try to read it in this guy’s own handwriting. His handwriting — Ulisse Aldrovandi’s handwriting is horrible, so he employed a lot of scribes, live-in students, who took his notes for him so that was extremely fortunate. That sort of connection to the past felt different to me when I was able to both be in those spaces, the spaces that is Italy, surrounded by some of the buildings, sort of living within the history, and then also working in the archives at the same time.
Jennifer Berglund 03:54
What was it about the space of the archives, not just reading through the materials, but just being in that environment surrounded by books and records?
Hannah Marcus 04:05
You know, the Aldrovandi archive is a really fascinating one. He left his books, that is his library of printed books, his manuscripts — many, many, many manuscripts — and also his museum collection. So he collected minerals and plants and animals. He left all of these to the University of Bologna at his death in 1605.
Jennifer Berglund 04:29
This is the guy who coined the term “geology.”
Hannah Marcus 04:32
He coined the term “geology” in his will. Absolutely, it’s the first use of the term “geology” in his will. This is a really unique archive in that it brings together books, manuscripts, and then the stuff, the museums itself, too. This is like sort of the period of the rise of the early museum. I remain so grateful to this professor, Umberto Mazzoni, who sent me to this archive in the first place, is going to be recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is a really remarkable resource. That is where I learned about what was possible archivally of how we think with objects, and archival records, and printed books all at the same time. The space itself is fascinating. It’s in this big, old palazzo. For me, what was really unique about that, and I think has really shaped my career, actually, right? So like this is when I was in my junior year of college, but what has shaped my career is thinking about the archival record as made up of these three parts: archives, libraries, and objects, and thinking about them together.
Jennifer Berglund 05:38
You became particularly interested in censored books, and you wrote a book about Catholic censorship. So, tell me about that, and what does a collection of censored books tell you that a single censored book cannot?
Hannah Marcus 05:53
I’ll go back to my personal history for a second to say that I’d been working in Aldrovandi’s collection, and then I went back to Penn and wrote my senior thesis, and took a class about book history that was incredibly influential, for me. I was working in the library in the Special Collections, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Special Collections at Penn, and taking a class on the history of the book, and in that class, my professors pulled one day, when we were meeting in the collections, took out a copy of a censored book. It was a copy of Petrarch and the so-called “Babylonian Sonnets” were blacked out, and I was like, “Wow!” This object really drew me in, and I wanted to know more. Again, this is an opportunity for thinking about the histories of objects, of books as objects, and how they circulated in the wake of really extreme religious turmoil in the period following the Reformation. That was incredibly intriguing. And then when I went off to graduate school, another sort of historical event happened. There had been the opening of the Inquisition Archives, the archives of the Roman Inquisition, in particular, in the Vatican.
Jennifer Berglund 06:59
Which is a big deal. It had been closed off for how long?
Hannah Marcus 07:03
400 years, and then it was open to scholars in 1998, I guess, and scholarship had begun sort of coming out of that, opening in the years that followed. And when I started graduate school, there were a four-volume set of books of published documents out of that archive, about the history of science and medicine. So thinking about how Catholic censors engaged with regulating scientific and medical books in the 16th century. My PhD advisor, Paula Findlen, said to me, “You should take a look at these.” I was enthralled. You know, this was an amazing opportunity for thinking about how the history of books as objects, and religion and science all came together, and I was sort of off to the races. I started looking for copies of censored books everywhere I went. I planned a trip to go to this archive in the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archive, and I started building collections of notes that included both the sort of administrative records of book censorship, so censors reading books, and being like, “You know, these lines have to go, these lines get to stay. This is problematic because of this” or “Make sure you take away so-and-so’s books, he’s reading things you shouldn’t be.” Pairing that kind of archival scholarship, I was searching through just hundreds and hundreds of early 15th, and 16th, and 17th century printed books that were then expurgated, that is like part censored like that one that I’d seen in the Special Collections at Penn those years before. Now, I was looking at many every day. Every morning that I was in Rome, doing my dissertation research, I would go to the Roman Inquisition Archive in the morning. It closed at one o’clock, and I would make my way across Piazza San Pietro, to the Vatican Library or across the city to the National Library, or to any number of other fabulous collections of books in Rome, and was pairing, always, the study of the archival record with the objects themselves. I’ve thought about that a little bit in terms of an archive of practice, that is that we can think about their archives that are assembled in different ways by different administrative bodies or different individuals. But if we look across, censored books were never meant to be an archive but we can treat them as one. If we find hundreds, we can start to see patterns across them. We can start to see anomalies.We can understand how people engaged with them as physical objects, but also as intellectual objects or personal objects. You see people writing and being like, “I don’t want to make this book look horrible by censoring it,” and then you can see how they adapt the process of expurgation to include like pasting little white slips over something instead of blacking it out, that that looked better to them, or instead of scribbling out a name, and sorry for those of you who are listening and you’re not getting to watch, but I’ve got some good hand motions going. I’m sort of scribbling out the names. You can see them transforming, like painstakingly transforming letters — capital E into a B and changing letters into other letters such that they no longer say the words that you weren’t supposed to be reading, but instead are sort of strings of nonsense characters that enact censorship but without having to ruin the aesthetic of the book. I became very interested in thinking about how books are objects, and how we might read books, not just for the text that’s in them, but for the reception and history of use that they carry with them as well. One of the big archival finds that came out of my first book was that I was very interested in this idea of people getting permission to read prohibited books. It’s like 007 License to Read. So I was looking for those. I was like, I’ve got to find more. I’m really curious about what this says, what it says when you look for, like, who’s reading at different times, what books people are getting permission to read at different times. And one of the things that I think is most exciting that came out of that book was that I found previously, people had been looking at particular examples of reading licenses, but I found 1000s of licenses to read prohibited books. And this is like a different scale for how we think about reception history, that is the history of how books circulated and who had them. Library records tell us that somebody owned a copy of a book, but they don’t say whether they read it or not. Prohibited books are books that shouldn’t have reception histories, right? If a book is prohibited in Italy, there shouldn’t be a reception history of it, technically. I mean, we know that there often was, right? Galileo didn’t have a reading license to read Copernicus, and we know he was reading Copernicus so there’s certainly illicit circulation, but the scholarship had really been sort of exclusively focused on these sort of underground, illicit circulation of prohibited books. And one of the things that I found when I was digging through these archival records in the Vatican was that hundreds and even 1000s of readers were getting official permission in the 16th and 17th century to read books that were prohibited. And this really changes the way that we see censorship, I think. It takes it from being like an exclusively black-and-white issue about, “Yes, you can have it” or “No, you can’t,” to say that there was a huge gray area of circulation of books, where parts of them were allowed to be read but not other parts, certain people were allowed to read and not others. And it’s just like incredible Catholic effort to control knowledge that simultaneously was trying to manage lots of individual readers and manage a limited circulation of these ideas.
Jennifer Berglund 12:37
What kinds of people would they allow to read censored books?
Hannah Marcus 12:42
Cardinals were allowed to read without permission, so that’s interesting and then you see bishops writing in for permission to read certain books, but I became very interested in physicians, in particular. And so I ended up writing about the censorship of medical books. I went in with my overly optimistic dissertation topic. I was like, I will write about all of censorship and all censored books. It became immediately clear that the archival record was vast, and I was going to have to make some decisions. And I became very interested, in particular, in the censorship of medical and scientific, but like, really, especially medical books, because physicians in the 16th and 17th century are such a sort of clear, professional group who think about their professional identity a lot. I argue, in my book, that reading prohibited books became part of that professional identity, that they would write in for reading licenses, asking for permission to read books, talking about how useful prohibited books were to them, as physicians, that they needed this knowledge. They were like, “We can’t medicate without Fuchs.” We need these prohibited books, but then additionally, physicians talked about how useful they were, how useful physicians were, for maintaining a healthy Catholic society. And you know, you can read it on one level and say, like, is this just justification for getting to read what they want to read? Yes, that’s part of it. But I think it goes beyond that as well, that we can really see physicians defining their expertise over a realm that included knowledge that the Catholic Church treated at face level as being prohibited, and that they then through the advocacy of some of these physicians, they were able to carve out really a set of texts that they were interacting with, even though they were prohibited.
Jennifer Berglund 14:18
How do you think that impacted medicine in those days?
Hannah Marcus 14:22
I think that impacted physicians, in particular, and so medical practitioners and how medical practitioners went about engaging with patients. And I think that one of the things that we sort of intuitively sometimes misunderstand about medicine in the early modern period is that we often see medicine as sort of primarily engaged with caring for the human body, and that’s certainly part of it, but for Renaissance physicians, that’s only a part of what they do. Part of what they do is scholarship and study. And so I’ve really focused on medicine as a bookish pursuit. It’s not clear that, for example, Ullise Aldrovandi, who I talked about a little bit earlier. It’s not clear that he really treated patients ever. And yet, he was a physician and he taught medicine. I’m really interested in drawing out that sort of difference in the history of medicine and what physicians did, and how they understood themselves and some of how their status in society relied on their position as scholars, and part of that position relied on their reading of prohibited books.
Jennifer Berglund 15:26
You came to Harvard’s History of Science Department in 2017 and saw CHSI’s, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments Collections for the first time during your interview. It was then that you first encountered your favorite CHSI object, the Galileo compass. Tell me about that experience and that object, and why you gravitated towards it.
Hannah Marcus 15:51
When I interviewed here at Harvard, one of the things that I thought was really fabulous was that they set me up with Jean-François Gauvin, who was then running the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and he took me through not only the Putnam Gallery downstairs, but also through the storage of the collection as well, and let me just sort of think my way into the possibilities of what it would mean to be in a department that was affiliated with a museum. Again, I’ve been thinking since my undergraduate days about how we do research, sort of across books, and manuscripts, and objects, and then here I was, having the potential to enter a department where that was built into what we do here. So it was really exciting to get to see sort of the back end of the the basement end of the collection, as well as the just absolutely spectacular objects that are held in the permanent collections, and on display. Let’s talk about the display objects, my favorite. I’ve been nerding out about many aspects of them, and it’s been a pleasure to learn and to learn with our team, with our curator, with our collections team about the many treasures in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, but I write not only about physicians. I write a lot about Galileo, too. The end of my book on censorship is reevaluating the Galileo case with a better understanding of how censorship operated in the 50 years prior to the banning of Copernicus, and then Galileo’s works that followed. I’d been writing about Galileo, publishing on Galileo, and then you walk into this gallery on the bottom floor of the Science Center, and there’s a military compass that Galileo made or that Mazzoleni, the guy who’s his instrument maker who lives in Galileo’s house, made. And it’s just, it’s right there. And it’s amazing. It’s this brass instrument. It’s a compass of these two sort of arms. It’s got this pendulum hanging down from in. I’ve had amazing tutorials with our curator, Sara Schechner, where she’s taught me how to use it. You can find cube roots, you can use it to do currency exchange rates, you can use it to figure out what angle you need to set a cannon at in order to bombard somebody, you can use it to figure out if you’re bombarding somebody and then you run out of cannon balls and you’re going to replace it with rocks, then, like, what angle things need to be at because the weights are going to be different. So it can help me solve all sorts of problems, but it’s also one of these great cases for thinking, again, across instruments, books, and sort of archival record in Galileo’s military compass, which again, can we put out that it’s downstairs. I’m sitting in the science center right now. Something that Galileo made is sitting two floors below me. It’s amazing, and it’s a great example of it as well. The military compass itself is the one that he gave to Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, trying to get himself a better job. He was angling for a better job than he currently had at the time at the University of Padua in the late 1590s. He ends up really getting a pay raise when he makes the telescope, instead. The Gonzaga Dukes offer him some money, but not enough to make it worth his while to leave Padua. But then he improves the telescope a few years later, and gets a huge raise from Venice for that, and then manages to gain patronage from Florence and gets what he sees as an even better position there. So Galileo is always looking for the next step in his career, and this is an example of him trying to do that. But I want to point out, again, when we study the past, the different things that we can bring to that study. And for Galileo’s compass, it’s important to realize that it’s an object, but it’s not just me that has trouble using it intuitively. You can’t intuitively use it. It’s not totally clear what you’re supposed to do with it. So Galileo would give lessons and you would pay for lessons on how to use the military compass. And then he also publishes a book on how to use it, and sort of mired in some controversy. But the book itself doesn’t teach you how to do it either. You need all three. You need the thing, you need the book, and you need the lessons from Galileo. So I like to think of that, again, as an opportunity to think about the different things that we bring together when we study history. That these things can’t stand on their own. They couldn’t stand on their own in their own day, and we shouldn’t understand them on their own now, either. So it’s amazing for me, there are many wonderful places to work and think. For me, one of the great privileges of being at Harvard is being able to work and think among some of the best collections in the world, and to be somebody who studies the distant past, things that happened 400-500 years ago, but with parts of that past, just in my daily life, and open for free to visitors. You know, anybody can come into the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments when we’re open. You walk in those doors. You’ll greet the greeter. You’ll tell them your zip code, but then you look to the left and you’ll see Galileo’s compass. You don’t even have to go in, you can see it through the window. And just being able to be in proximity to the past, that’s an amazing thing for me. It’s a real gift. It’s a gift that I’m hoping to share with people, and thank you for inviting me to talk a little bit about it today. That gives me the opportunity to do so as well.
Jennifer Berglund 17:47
That’s amazing. Thanks for talking about it. It’s just amazing. Do you know anything about how Harvard acquired Galileo’s compass?
Hannah Marcus 21:01
Yes, it’s tied to the history of the collection, in general. So our collection is historical. Harvard began collecting historical scientific instruments in the 17th century at the same time that it was founded. So scientific instruments were used to teach Natural Philosophy, to teach science at Harvard College. And there’s was a great history of Ben Franklin going and buying a bunch of instruments for Harvard College in Paris and in London when he’s on a diplomatic trip for the United States, so our collection has a long history. But it really came into being when our initial curator collector, David P. Wheatland, he had his own collection, but he was also going around Harvard, and stopping in at labs, looking in closets, and asking people, “That’s a cool instrument. Are you using that? Are people still using that in your laboratory?” And people were like, “Nah, we don’t have any use for that anymore.” And he started seeing the potential. The Ben Franklin stuff was prized all along, but other things weren’t. Harvard has continued doing scientific experimentation for the hundreds of years that followed that, as well, as we know. With tremendous foresight, he saw an opportunity to collect for Harvard, the many parts of Harvard’s history in the sciences that had physical remnants. So as he was growing Harvard’s collection, he was also growing his own, which he then left to Harvard and the Galilean compass is part of that. So he acquired it for, I think, like 450 pounds or something.
Jennifer Berglund 22:26
That’s absurd.
Hannah Marcus 22:28
I asked our curator the other day, and she’s like, “I will not write what a current price would be.” It’s in some ways, priceless, right? This is an absolutely phenomenal object. But we’re really grateful for his generosity in his foresight and thinking about this collection and what it could add to Harvard.
Jennifer Berglund 22:47
Do you have any other favorite objects?
Hannah Marcus 22:50
Well, right now I’m nerding out about the Pope Orrery. Joseph Pope made an orrery, a model of the cosmos and it’s gigantic.
Jennifer Berglund 22:56
Pope, not as in Catholic Pope.
Hannah Marcus 22:58
Not as in the Catholic Pope. As in colonial US and then early US after the revolution clockmaker. I’m running, under the direction of our curator, Sara Schechner, we’re running a workshop on the Pope Orrery in a few weeks. It’s huge. It’s a model of the solar system, but it runs on all of this complicated gearing.
Jennifer Berglund 23:16
It’s beautiful.
Hannah Marcus 23:17
It is beautiful. And I think the beauty, the aesthetic quality of some of these instruments is something that we really take seriously in our collection, too. And I think it’s worth thinking about. When is science beautiful, and when isn’t it? When you engage with a scientific instrument, be it, like, a medical apparatus and your next appointment. When is it beautiful? What of the aesthetic qualities of that tool, tell you about what people are thinking about? I mean, it’s gorgeous. It’s wood. It’s got cast figures on it that may have been done by Paul Revere, though there’s no evidence of that. But there’s no evidence that it isn’t that. And we knew he was doing that kind of work. It’s deeply, sort of, tied into Revolutionary history, and it was being assembled at a time when the parts that went into making clocks weren’t being made in the colonies in then the fledging United States. They’re being made in England and then brought over, and so one of the things that has been so amazing as we prepare for this workshop, which is going to bring in experts, historians, conservators, horologists, so that’s like people who study clocks.
Jennifer Berglund 24:15
Yes.
Hannah Marcus 24:16
And working on clocks, bringing them all together. One of the things that we were able to do was to open up the Orrery and take the top off of it, and then take all of the little moving planets. So we took the sun off, we took the planets with their moons off, and then looked sort of into the bowels of it, into the literal clockwork. And it was so phenomenal because it’s not done in a way that’s intuitive in the slightest. Pope was working with the materials that he had, and it’s just got like gazillions of little gears lined up in a long row to be able to make the arrangements that allowed for the circulation of the planets in the way that they move through the cosmos. It’s incredible. It’s incredible. And it’s an incredible example of colonial science, of the ways in which folks were working with what was available to them and it’s also interesting Uranus, the planet, was discovered while Pope was working on it, but he never integrated that into the orrery. It was already underway. There was no place for a new planet, and things continued so it was outdated, in some respects as a model, as soon as it was made. Then again, there’s something about the beauty, there’s something about how we can model the functioning of something like the solar system, and how we can do that with the understanding of a clockmaker. And this is one of the most powerful metaphors for understanding the world in the 18th century is a mechanical philosophy, being able to understand how something works the way a clockmaker understands that something works, right? That the clockmaker isn’t pushing, repeatedly, on the gears to make them go. The clockmaker sets it all up and then steps back. That’s part of their philosophy for understanding how the cosmos works, how the world works, as well. That perhaps God set it up and then stepped back, and now we can understand, using philosophy and reason and experimentation, the principles that govern how it works, and we can then model them. And that’s what the Pope orrery is. It’s a model of exactly how the solar system works.
Jennifer Berglund 26:11
In your teaching, you feel it’s very important for students to experience archives and collections. What kind of learning and scholarship for students do these rooms provide that, say, an online catalog cannot?
Hannah Marcus 26:24
I think that we live so much of our lives, especially true for me during our lockdowns and our year of remote teaching due to COVID, that so much of our lives take place online, like, remotely, at a distance. And it’s just always been true for me that I feel a greater connection to the past when I’m able to be in physical proximity to the artifacts from it. That makes it real. Additionally, there’s nothing like looking at something from the past and understanding what it’s made of, how it functioned, to then also raise questions for you about how it was produced, and who was involved in producing it, right? So for the Galileo compass. Galileo is involved in its design and its marketing and teaching it. He probably didn’t make it himself. His instrument maker, Marc’Antonio Mazzoleni made it, but he was also living at Galileo’s house with his family. So this becomes a story about labor histories, about how materials move around the globe, even a long time ago. So thinking about objects, or thinking about even books as objects, allows you to think about production, and about the many hands that go into them. And I think that this moves us away from whenever you’re thinking about the past as made up of things, also, this gets you away from Galileo as just a brilliant cosmologist, an isolated genius, and gets us to Galileo person working through the world, working with other people, antagonizing other people…he never did that. This gets us to Pope as somebody who’s tinkering with the many pieces of clocks that he has available to him, not just Pope reflecting on the mechanical magnificence of the cosmos. And allows us to understand the sort of rich and complex systems that go into supporting any scientific enterprise at any time. And that’s one of the things that I want my students to really understand. The history of science is never just the big names. It’s always the many systems that go into that, and that we should see ourselves as involved in those systems. Many of my students are part of labs at Harvard. This is doing science. It’s what it means to do science. We have influence on that, as well. We can think about broadening the scope of how science is produced, and then I think that that’s sort of motivating also for thinking about how we can be involved in changing and maybe improving scientific work going forward.
Jennifer Berglund 28:50
How are students using the CHSI collection for their work?
Hannah Marcus 28:54
I bring students into the collections, always. It’s meaningful, for me. It’s been inspirational for me, but I also want them to understand that these collections at Harvard are there for them to use, and there for them to teach others, as well. Once they’ve been in a space, they’re more likely to drag their friend in when they’re five minutes early. Realistically, they’re not five minutes early to class, but like if there five minutes early to class, they can stop in and view the galleries. But that allows them also to do research projects. There are opportunities for people to do independent research projects or research projects associated with their classes for the department or for other classes. We’ve got graduate students who have even recently curated an absolutely fabulous exhibit. There’s an exhibit in our second-floor gallery. So if you come visit, go check out the Galileo compass and the Pope Orrey and the cyclotron and all the cool things on the ground floor, but then ascend the stairs or take the elevator, and go check out the second-floor galleries as well, where we have rotating exhibits and the current exhibit is on surveillance and that’s actually been curated by three graduate students.
Jennifer Berglund 29:52
Who we interviewed for the last episode of the podcast, so listen to that, too, and get a little backstory there.
Hannah Marcus 29:59
Aaron, Carolyn, and Matt did just an absolutely fabulous job curating this. When we think about what it is to produce scholarship and who we talk to as scholars, museums can give us this absolutely fabulous opportunity to speak to broader publics and to bring the things that motivate us as scholars and the insights that we have, from our deep expertise, to bring those to broader audiences, to bring them alive to people through engagement with our collections. And it’s just been such a pleasure to get to bring the ideas of these graduate students, watch them come to life, and in such a fabulous way. We’ve got these wonderful graduate curators who did a ton of research and went into the collections. But when we think about then what supported that, and then what went into creating this exhibit? We’ve got teams within the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Our teams supported that through collections, their interpretation with our curator, we’ve worked closely with the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and their Exhibit Team who fabricated it, who built the stuff to bring it to life for you. There’s so much that goes into how we communicate our work as scholars. It’s been great to get to facilitate that for graduate students. We’ve also got new exhibits coming up in the next few years curated by faculty members here at Harvard. Gabriela Soto Laveaga is doing an exhibit called “Measuring Difference” that will go up a year from now. And we’re thinking a lot about how the space of a gallery can be part of how we share our research. Research isn’t meant to be put behind a paywall in expensive journals that are written in a tone that nobody can understand. That’s not the ethos I want to bring to the research that I do. I want people to understand the critical insights, the new ways of seeing the world and moving through it. That historical research, that research into the history of science, the history of surveillance, the history of instrumentation, the history of censorship, how we can bring those to our present. And I mean, a quick plug on how we can bring them to our present. It is banned books week, this week. The end of Banned Books Week, as we’re recording this. Yes, so I’ve been talking a lot about censorship this week. And you need to think about what’s happening in a long historical perspective, and that’s the unique perspective of historians that allows us to think about the ways that the past resonates in the present. It’s not the same. It doesn’t repeat, but it resonates. And I think that doing so through exhibits and through engagement with objects is just a fabulous opportunity that the collections at Harvard here make possible.
Jennifer Berglund 32:27
Your enthusiasm about everything you talked about is just absolutely infectious. I have to ask, what excites you most about your new role as the Director of Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments?
Hannah Marcus 32:44
Aside from the fact that I can go look at the Galileo compass, even when the collection isn’t open? What excites me the most is being able to think about how we engage more students and more community members in the important ways of approaching the past that our collections make possible. So I’m really excited to be working with our teams here in the collection, our teams at HMSC, our teams at Harvard more broadly, to think about bringing our insights to broader audiences. This is the work that we get to do, and it’s such a pleasure to get to be a spokesperson for it, to get to be an enthusiast about it. For me, I am a scholar, so one of the great things is to go read everything that there is to read about Galileo’s compass, to speak with the world experts, and talk to our curator about how she’s going through the local archives to uncover the smallest details about the Pope Orrery that can allow us to see it differently, and to then think about history differently. So being able to combine that, sort of, really deep expertise with outward-facing engagement is the thing that I really love. In closing, I’d just like to offer the reminder that our collection is free and open to the public. We’re on the first floor of the Science Center, and the second floor of the Science Center, 1 Oxford Street. We’re open Sunday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm. If you’d like to bring a class, we can accommodate that. We work with classrooms across the Boston area. We’re really excited to get to share our collections with you. I’m really excited to welcome you to our collections.
Jennifer Berglund 34:16
Hannah Marcus, thank you so much for being here. This is just wonderful to hear about your new role and the fabulous things to come.
Hannah Marcus 34:24
Thank you.
Jennifer Berglund 34:30
Today’s HMSC Connects! Podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and to Hannah Marcus, for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a few weeks.