Dr Sven Dupré
University of Ghent
Sven Dupré (Ph.D in Philosophy, Ghent University, 2002) is a postdoctoral fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation in Belgium. He is a founding member of the Centre for History of Science at Ghent University, having previously worked at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Florence), the Center for the Study of Science and Technology at Rice University (Houston) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). In 2007 he was a visiting research fellow at the Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney as well as offered a visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research interests include the history of optics and mathematical practice; instruments, collections and the material culture of science; and issues of visualization including interactions between art and science, with a focus on the early modern period.
Recently, he edited a volume on Optics, Instruments and Painting (Brill, 2005) coming out of a ESF conference on the Hockney thesis. Other recent publications include: 'Visualization in Renaissance Optics: The Function of Geometrical Diagrams and Pictures in the Transmission of Practical Knowledge', in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, edited by Sachiko Kusukawa and Ian Maclean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 11-39; (with Michael Korey) 'The Use and Re-use of Optical Instruments: Creating Knowledge in the Dresden Kunstkammer', in Bart Grob and Hans Hooijmaijers (eds.), Who needs scientific instruments?, Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 2006, pp. 75-80; 'Optics, Pictures and Evidence: Leonardo's Drawings of Mirrors and Machinery', Early Science and Medicine, vol. 10, 2005, pp. 211-236. An edited volume (together with Sachiko Kusukawa) Institutions of knowledge, circles of knowledge in early modern Europe is in preparation. He also coordinates an international research network on 'circulating knowledge in early modern science' (2006-2010), sponsored by the Flemish Research Foundation, which brings together 11 research centres in Europe and the USA. He is on the editorial board of Science in Context, a journal published by Cambridge University Press.
Currently, Dupré is working on a book-length study covering the long-term development of optics between ca. 1500 and ca. 1700. The focus is on how the uses of optical knowledge in different contexts are connected to conceptual and disciplinary changes. In this book he intends to look at the role of travelling concepts in the transmission of knowledge between different contexts, at how these concepts acquire new meanings in new contexts, the role of media in this transmission and, finally, at the proliferation of different images of optical knowledge as the consequence of the appropriation of this knowledge in new places. While a visiting fellow at CRASSH, he will continue to develop case studies on the disciplinary and conceptual changes of optics when it was appropriated at several sites outside the universities (such as courtly Kunstkammern and painters' workshops). He also hopes to work on the question of how universities (together, and in competition, with other teaching institutions emerging in the early modern period) reacted to these different images of optics developed outside the universities, and of which strategies they employed to adopt, select (or resist) an image of optics, replacing the existing image of optics. This will be a starting point to reflect on the role of teaching institutions in knowledge circulation and disciplinary change
