Elena Aronova – Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Personal Statement:

I am a historian of science working on topics ranging from the history of Lamarckian thought in biology to Cold War scientific spaces in the US and the Soviet Union, and from the history of “scientific humanities” to the history and politics of global data collection. My most recent book, Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2021), tells an intriguing story of attempts to integrate scientific knowledge and new technologies — from plant genetics to computers — into historical research. Using the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as the anchoring point, this book reconnects the disciplinary histories of the sciences and those of the humanities to reveal a landscape of socialist political imaginaries where one would least expect it: in the debates about scientific history. I am currently on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, researching my next book on how biologists offered multiple ways to conceive of time and temporality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Advisor to:

Avie Rath

Selected Publications:

Books:

Edited volumes:

Selected articles and peer-reviewed chapters:

“Scientometrics With and Without Computers: The Cold War Transnational Journeys of the Science Citation Index,” Cold War Social Sciences: Transnational Entanglements, ed. by. Mark Solovey and Christian Daye (Palgrave, 2021). Pp. 73-98
“Геофизические датаскейпы холодной войны: политика и практики мировых центров данных“ / Логос. 2020. № 2 (135). С. 41-92.
“Earthquake Prediction, Biological Clocks, and the Cold War Psy-ops: Using Animals as Seismic Sensors in the 1970s California,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, 70 (2018)
“Geophysical Datascapes of the Cold War: Politics and Practices of the World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s,“ Osiris 32 (2017): 307-327
“Russian and the Making of World Languages during the Cold War,” Isis 108, no. 3 (2017): 643-650
“Citizen Seismology, Stalinist Science, and Vladimir Mannar’s Cold Wars,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 42/2 (2017): 226-256
“Environmental Monitoring in the Making: From Surveying Nature’s Resources to Monitoring Nature’s Change,”Historische Sozialforschung 40/2 (2015): 222-245
“Big science and “Big science studies” in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War” in Naomi Oreskes and John Krige, eds., Science and technology in the global cold war ( The MIT Press, 2014), pp. 393-429
“The congress for cultural freedom, Minerva, and the quest for instituting ‘Science Studies’ in the Cold War” Minerva, 50/3 (2012): 307-337.
“The Politics and Contexts of Soviet Science Studies (Naukovedenie): Soviet Philosophy of Science at the Crossroads“Studies in East European Thought 63 / 3 (2011): 175-202
“Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year to the Long-Term Ecological Research Program, 1957 – present” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40 / 2 (2010): 183-224 (with Karen Baker and Naomi Oreskes)

Review essays:

Review of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown: Science Vol. 363, Issue 6431 (2019): 1044
“Recent Trends in the Historiography of Science in the Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 47/4 (2017): 568-577

Courses Taught:

HIST 105CW: Science and Technology in the Cold War
HIST 107S: Biology and Society
HIST 105D: Visionary Biology: Between Science and Science Fiction
HIST 107C: The Darwinian Revolution
HIST 105R: Research Seminar — History of the Atomic Age
HIST 105Q: Reading Seminar — Histories of the Future
HIST 201HS: Advanced Approaches to the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (syllabus varies each time the course is being offered)
HIST 201S: Topics in the History of Science (topics vary each year the course is being offered)
HIST 277 A-B: Research Seminar in the History of Science (team-taught, topics vary)

Honors and Professional Activities:

Willis F. Doney Fellow, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2024-25)
Short-term Fellow, The Huntington Library (2024-25)
IHC Faculty Fellow, 2018-2019
Research Associate, Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien, Munich, Germany (2018 – present)
Scholar-In-Residence, Graduate School for the East and Southeast European Studies (Die Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien), Munich, Germany (April-June 2014)
Fellow-In-Residence, the Institute for Advanced Study (the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg) in Greifswald, Germany, 2011-2012
Scholar-In-Residence, The Rockefeller Archival Center, 2005
Fulbright scholar to US (2004-2005)
Egide – CNRS fellow, hosted by the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, Paris (2003)

Books:

Edited volumes:

Selected articles and peer-reviewed chapters:

Review essays:

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