Simon Werrett has taught in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London since 2012. Previously he was Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and is currently working on the history of materials and practices of material stewardship in the early modern sciences. Werrett is one of the organisers of ETR, together with Leonie Hannan and Anna Maerker.
Anna Maerker is a historian of medicine at King’s College London. She developed an interest in materials while working on her book Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815 (Manchester University Press 2011), a study of the anatomical wax models at the Florentine Museo La Specola and the Viennese Josephinum Academy. More recently she has investigated the role of materials for anatomical preservation and modelling. The ETR project will be an opportunity to explore broader questions about how materials shape cultures of healing, and how medicine influences the development and use of materials.
Leonie Hannan is an historian of eighteenth-century gender, domestic space, and epistolary and material culture. Her doctoral research identified the home as a key site for female knowledge production and her current research uses material, spatial and textual evidence to explore the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the home, illuminating connections between the domestic and the investigative. Leonie is a lead researcher on 100 Hours, a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project focused on the study of material culture. She is currently co-editing a book: Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (forthcoming 2015) and has written for publication in the Women’s History Review, Women’s Writing, and Literature & History.
Emotions, Transformations, Restorations 