Eighteenth-Century Science and Culture

Inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories, and through readings of Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, Abraham Cowley, public scientific demonstrators and unaffiliated scientists, and various periodicals, this essay argues that science operated as an epistemology, praxis, and a set of relations to organize people and institutions. This archive likewise reveals the urgency of creating new histories that do not uncritically replicate social, ideological, and epistemological hierarchies and violence, but instead imagine “eighteenth-century science and culture” as a collective intellectual project dedicated to imagining liberatory spaces and possibilities.