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Michael A. Osborne

Department Fields

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Current Graduate Students

History of Medicine; Environmental History; European Imperialism


Research Professor of History of Science and Environmental Studies
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Phone: 1-541-737-3421   Fax: 1-541-737-1257

I write on health, biology, and the environment. I am accepting new graduate students at Oregon State University's Graduate Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at: (more...)

Research and Teaching Interests

  • I teach courses on the history of health, disease, and healing; the history of biology; and environment and culture.

Current Projects

  • The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France
    Accepted with University of Chicago Press
  • The End of the Golden Age
    This book under development charts the human encounter with alpine environments since the invention of modern photography.
  • New Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion (publications on-going but project closed 2009)
    A project with the enviornmental philosopher, James Proctor, of Lewis and Clark College. We employed social scientific and humanistic methods to study nature and spirituality with the assistance of a John Templeton Foundation grant.
  • California Institute of Regenerative Medicine
    From time to time I teach an interdisciplinary bioethics course on human embryonic research issues to historians, humanists, and post-doctoral fellows in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at UCSB, OSU, and elsewhere.
  • Creativity in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of the Humanities in Awakening Societal Change
    Click on the title above for a U-Tube version of this event hosted by U.C. Berkeley's Institue of the Environment.

Selected Publications

  • “Medical Climatology in France: The Persistence of Neo-Hippocratic Ideas in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” (with Richard S. Fogarty)
    Bulletin of the History of Medicine (in press, December 2013)
  • “Colonial Science, Contagion, and the Imaginarium of Marseille"
    Perspectives: Journal Réseau français des Instituts d’études avancées, 6 (Spring 2012): 12-13
    Osborne-RFIEA-Final-2012.pdf
  • “Lawrence Badash, 8 May 1934 – 23 August 2010" (with Peter Neushul)
    Isis 102 (September 2011): 527-529
  • "Eugenics in France and the Colonies" (with Richard S. Fogarty)
    Alison Bashford, Philippa Levine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 332-346
  • "Raphael Blanchard, Parasitology, and the Positioning of Medical Entomology in Paris"
    Parassitologia 50, nos. 3-4 (2008; pub. 2009): 213-220
  • "Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire"
    New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008)
  • "Edouard-Marie Heckel"
    New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008)
  • "Science and the French Empire"
    Isis 96 (2005): 80-87
  • "Views from the periphery: Discourses of Race and Place in French Military Sciences" (with Richard S. Fogarty)
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 25 (2003): 363-389
  • “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”
    Osiris 15 (2001): 601-617
  • “The Geographical Imperative in Nineteenth Century French Medicine”
    Medical History, supplement 20 (2000): 31-50
  • "Nature, Technology, and the Human Condition" (with Catherine L. Newell)
    Martin Drenthen, et alia. New Visions of Nature: Complexity and Authenticity (Springer, 2009), 267-276
  • Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism.
    Indiana University Press, 1994

Honors and Professional Activities

Alpine Activities