People

Director

Professor Pamela H. Smith founded the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University in 2014. She is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and Founding Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia. At Columbia, she teaches history of early modern Europe and the history of science. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton 1994; 1995 Pfizer Prize), and The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 2004; 2005 Leo Gershoy Prize). Her work on alchemy, artisans, and the making of vernacular and scientific knowledge has been supported by fellowships at the Wissenschafts-Kolleg, as a Guggenheim Fellow, a Getty Scholar, a Samuel Kress Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Her current research focuses on attitudes to nature in early modern Europe and the Scientific Revolution, with particular attention to craft knowledge and historical techniques.
Contact: ps2270@columbia.edu

Associate Director

Naomi Rosenkranz is the Associate Director of the Center for Science and Society and its research cluster, the Making and Knowing Project. She oversees the development and administration of the Center and its research clusters, Scholars, grant programs, activities, and events. For the Making and Knowing Project, she serves as the main administrative liaison between the various research, editorial, and digital activities of the Project staff, collaborators, and participants. She supports the historical reconstruction research, oversees the Project’s chemical laboratory, and maintains the digital collaboration systems. She studied physics at Barnard College (class of 2015), concentrating her research experiences in materials science and engineering (including synthesis and characterization of superconductors and photoconductive properties of organic nanorods). In 2014-15, she served as the inaugural Science Resident in Conservation with Columbia’s Ancient Ink Lab, identifying and characterizing ancient carbon-based inks. She continued her investigation of inks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, working with the departments of Scientific Research and Paper Conservation to examine medieval iron-tannate black inks through recipe reconstructions and spectral analysis of museum objects.
Contact: njr2128@columbia.edu

Project and Communications Manager

Caroline Surman serves as the Project and Communications Manager with the Making and Knowing Project and the Center for Science and Society. She studied Anthropology with a minor in Environmental Science at Barnard College and holds a masters degree in nonprofit management from Columbia University. In 2014, Caroline completed an anthropological study of craftsmen in New York City, focusing on the role of gender, class, and education in the art vs. craft dichotomy. She has also conducted qualitative and quantitative research in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. Before joining the Project in 2017, Caroline worked for Bank Street School for Children and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Contact: cms2274@columbia.edu

Lead Paleographer

Marc Smith, Professor of Medieval and Modern Paleography, École nationale des chartes, is the Making and Knowing Project’s Lead Paleographer and co-directs the Text and Paleography Workshops. His research in paleography generally focuses on the evolution of the Latin alphabet in its long-term cultural, technical and cognitive conditions, and at present on the engravings of master-writers in modern times.
Contact: Marc.Smith@enc-sorbonne.fr

Digital Lead

Terry Catapano is the Making and Knowing Project’s Digital Lead, overseeing the development, maintenance, and preservation of the Project’s digital assets. He is an Information Analyst at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Previously, Terry was a Librarian and Special Collections Analyst in Columbia Libraries’ Division of Digital Library and Scholarly Technologies. As Chair of the Society of American Archivists’ Schema Development Team, he was responsible for the development of Encoded Archival Description version 3, and is a member of the ArchivesSpace Technical Advisory Group and the Editorial Board for the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). Terry is also Vice President of Plazi Verein, leading the development of the TaxPub extension of the National Library of Medicine/National Center for Biotechnology Information Journal Publishing DTD, and working on digitizing, text mining, and providing open access to the literature of biological systematics, including collaborations with WikiData, the Encylopedia of Life, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ZooBank, and CERN.
Contact: thc4@berkeley.edu

Former Postdoctoral Scholars

Tianna Uchacz (2016-20), Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) and Research Fellow (Chemical Heritage Foundation) is an art historian specializing in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art. She received her PhD in 2016 from the University of Toronto with Ethan Matt Kavaler on the role of the sensual nude in Netherlandish art and culture before Iconoclasm. Uchacz held the inaugural James Loeb Fellowship for the Classical Tradition in Art and Architecture at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich from May to July 2016, where she addressed an experimental approach to masculinity in Maerten van Heemskerck’s male nudes. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Visualization at Texas A&M University.

Tillmann Taape (2017-20) Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) is a historian of science working on craft knowledge, medicine, and the occult in the early modern period. After a Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences specializing in Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he turned to the history of science and discovered the sixteenth-century German surgeon and apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, whose printed books became the subject of his recent PhD thesis. His research interests include the history of knowledge, the human body, and print culture. He is currently the Frances Yates Long-Term Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute.

Clément Godbarge (2019-20) Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) is a historian with a background in political science and Italian philology. His research focuses on the relations between science and statecraft in early-modern Europe. In his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 2017 at New York University, he examines through the life and works of Filippo Cavriana (1536-1606), the last physician of Catherine de’ Medici, how doctors embedded at the courts of sixteenth-century France, Italy, and Spain promoted themselves as political experts of a new genre. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission and the Renaissance Society of America. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Medici Archive Project.

Sophie Pitman (2017-18) Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) is a historian specializing in early modern material culture. Her doctoral research, conducted at the University of Cambridge, explored the making, buying, wearing, regulation and bequeathal of clothing in early modern London. She is particularly interested in reconstruction as a methodology for historians, and collaborates with makers and museums in her research on clothing, materiality, and craft in the early modern era. Her current research projects explore early modern dyes and color, and early modern tailoring practices and clothing during the English Civil War and Interregnum. She is the incoming Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the Center for Material Culture at the University of Madison-Wisconsin.

Donna Bilak (2014-17), Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) and Research Fellow (Chemical Heritage Foundation). Her research interests encompass early modern European history of science and alchemy, early modern emblem culture, as well as 19th-century jewelry history and technology. Bilak’s doctoral research reconstructed the life and times of a 17th-century Puritan alchemist who operated in England and America, and she was the 2013-14 Edelstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. She has lectured extensively on the topics of early modern alchemy as well as jewelry history throughout North America and Europe.

Joel A. Klein (2014-17), Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) and Research Fellow (Chemical Heritage Foundation). Joel launched the Making and Knowing Project’s website in 2014. He specializes in the history of science and medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the interactions among chymistry, medicine and atomism in German universities. At the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project, he encoded Newton’s handwritten manuscripts and recreated several of his alchemical experiments in the laboratory. He is currently the Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library.

Jenny Boulboullé (2014-16), Lecturer-in-Discipline (Department of History, Columbia University) and Research Fellow (Chemical Heritage Foundation). She studied Art History and Romance Languages in Heidelberg, Germany and continued her studies in Art History and Philosophy in the Netherlands (MA Art History, MA Philosophy, University of Amsterdam; PhD, Maastricht University, Dec 2012). Her research focuses on hands-on experiences, practices, materiality, and aesthetics, combining philosophical, historical, and ethnographic research methods. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the European Research Council-funded Artechne Project at Utrecht University.

Former Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Scholars

Colin Debuiche (2017-19) is an art historian specialized in sixteenth-century French architecture. As a Gerda Henkel Posdoctoral Scholar, he studied Toulouse’s 16th Century artistic environment to gain knowledge on the context in which was written the Ms. Fr. 640 and exploring the history of manuscripts before they were integrated into Royal Collections. In 2016, he successfully defended, at the University of Toulouse, his PhD on Architecture and Erudite Culture at Toulouse during the Renaissance which was supervised by Professor Pascal Julien and Assistant Professor, Emmanuel Lurin (Paris IV-Sorbonne). His doctoral research explored the classical antique past of Toulouse, examining numerous buildings and ornament handbooks but also looking into hydraulic engineering and the rediscovery of mineral wealth in the Pyrenees Mountains (marble and metal).

Sarah Munoz (2019-20) is an art historian specialized in sixteenth-century French sculpted ornaments. In 2016, she received her PhD from the University of Toulouse on medallions with heads or busts in the sculpted decor of French monuments. She worked on an exhibition devoted to the Renaissance in Toulouse organized by Professor Pascal Julien (March-September 2018), where the manuscript Fr. 640 and some Making and Knowing Project’s life casts of plants and insects, produced according to the recipes in Fr.640, were displayed. In her research exploring the Archives of Toulouse, she collects documents about goldsmiths, founders, molders, and other metalworkers, and about the mint.

Expert Makers

Fall 2014: Tonny Beentjes, Program Leader Metal Conservation, University of Amsterdam
Spring 2015: Andrew Lacey, Artist and Independent Scholar
Fall 2015: Marjolijn Bol, Postdoctoral Scholar in Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University
Spring 2016: Erma Hermens, Senior Researcher in Technical Art History, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Fall 2016: Divya Anantharaman, Independent Taxidermist, Friends Forever Taxidermy; Morbid Anatomy Museum
Fall 2017: Jo Kirby Atkinson, Retired Senior Scientific Officer, National Gallery, London
Fall 2018: Ad Stijnman, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London

Digital Consultant

Alex Gil was the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History at Columbia University and affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He serves as a collaborator with faculty, students and the library leveraging non-trivial technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and scholarly communications.

Teaching Assistants

Atif Ahmed (Fall 2016-Spring 2017), Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Mehul Kumar (Fall 2016-Spring 2017), Computer Science,School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Varsha Maragi (Fall 2016-Spring 2017), Computer Science,School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Jeffrey Wayno (Fall 2016-2017), Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Columbia University

Student Research Associates

Claire Sabel (2014-15), Research Associate, Columbia University
Colin Debuiche (2015-16), Archival Researcher, University of Toulouse, France
Bingyan Hu (2015-16), Computer Science, Barnard College
Sarah Munoz (2015-16), Archival Researcher, University of Toulouse, France
Miriam Pensack (2015-16), Research Assistant, Columbia University
Jeffrey Palframan (2015-16), Graduate Research Assistant and Manager, Columbia University
Philip Cherian (Summer 2016), Alliance Intern, École Polytechnique, France
Margot Lyautey (Summer 2016), Alliance Intern, École Polytechnique, France
Christine Hu (Summer 2016), High School Intern, Phillips Exeter Academy, NH
Sharan Suryanarayanan (2016), Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Emre Tetik (2016-2018), Computer Science, Columbia College
Karuna Vikram (2016-2017), High School Intern, Hunter College High School, NY
Ludovic Touze-Peiffer (Summer 2017), Alliance Intern, École Polytechnique, France
Charlotte Nahley (Summer 2017, 2018, and 2019), High School Intern, Calhoun School, NY
Divya Mehrish (Summer 2018), High School Intern, Spence School, NY
Camilla Shulman (Summer 2018), High School Intern, Spence School, NY
Katie Vandermel (2019-2020), High School Intern, Bergen County Academies, NJ
Matthew Kumar (2019-2020), Computer Science and Philosophy, Columbia College
Kelsey Troth (2019-2020), Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Ray Abruzzi (2020-2021), History, Columbia University
Gregory Schare (2020-2024), Computer Science and Philosophy, Columbia College
Dana Chaillard (Summer 2020), Alliance Intern, École Polytechnique, France
Roni Kaufman (Summer 2020), Alliance Intern, École Polytechnique, France
Katie Vandermel (Summer 2020), High School Intern, Bergen County Academies, NJ
Christian Macahilig (2020-2021), American Studies, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Linus Glenhaber (2021-2022), History, Columbia University
Tanisha Shende (2021-2022), High School Intern, Bergen County Academies, NJ
Jacklyn Vandermel (2021-2022), High School Intern, Northern Valley Regional High School, NJ

Copy Editor

Hannah Elmer (Fall 2016-Spring 2019), History, Graduate School of Arts of Sciences

Laboratory Assistants

Nilam Patel (Fall 2015) Chemistry, Barnard College
Bella Buscarino (Spring 2016), Chemistry, Barnard College
Scott Sonnenberg (Spring 2016-Spring 2018), Economics and Art History, Columbia College
Carolin Rechberg (Fall 2018), Art and Art Education, Teachers College

Advisory Board