faculty

Kathryn Olesko

Director, Master of Arts in German and European Studies
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D. Cornell University, 1980

Professor Olesko's research focuses on the social history of science and technology in Germany, with special emphasis on how rational beliefs and actions relate to daily life, local cultures, and personal and professional identities. Her work, in addition, covers issues in historical methodology, everyday life, gender, and industrialization. She is the author of Physics as a Calling: Discipline and Practice in the Königsberg Seminar for Physics (Cornell, 1991) and the editor of Science in Germany: Problems at the Intersection of Institutional and Intellectual Issues (Osiris 5 (1989)). She is completing a book on the cultural politics of precision, viewed as both a qualitative attribute and a quantitative marker, from 1648 to 1989, and another on science and technology in Germanic Europe. She is the Editor of Osiris, a research journal that is dedicated to the cultural history of science.

She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Exxon Educational Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She has held visiting appointments at Cornell University and Princeton University, and from 1993 to 1997 was Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) at Georgetown University. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Olesko was a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin in 1998. The National Academy of Sciences appointed her to the US National Committee of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science in 2001.