Introduction

Scientific experts play a crucial role in modern societies. Expert advice is broadly employed nowadays in matters such as the fight against the disease, the prosecution of criminal activities, the development of military industry, the control of food quality and the regulation of industry, among many others.  Due to this important role, an increasing number of studies have been focused on the role of experts in modern western societies. The study of experts and expertise has an interdisciplinary nature, involving historians of science and sociologists of knowledge and professions, law scholars and historians of law as well as science popularisers and those who study the public image of science. All these ingredients make the study of experts an expanding area, placed at the crossroads of many disciplinary histories, and benefiting from the fruitful interaction of a heterogeneous group of scholars pursuing a broad spectrum of aims ranging from history, sociology or philosophy of science studies to current public policy problems. Taking into account these studies, the main goal of the meeting is to explore from a comparative perspective the shaping of the expert and expertise in the European periphery from late eighteenth-century to twentieth century.

SCHEDULE

Opening lecture: Wednesday November 30, 2011      

17.00: Ian Burney (University of Manchester, UK), "Our Environment in Miniature: Dust and the early 20 th century Forensic Imagination”.

(Lecture opened to the general public)

Thursday, December 1, 2011

9.00–9.30: Opening address by the organizing committee.

Session I

9.30–12.30  Chair: José Ramón Bertomeu

9.30–10.15: Christelle Rabier (The London School of Economics, UK), “Expertise, Labour, and the Public Sphere: the case of 18th century European medicine”

10.15–11.00: Katherine Watson (Oxford Brookes University, UK), “Medico-legal expertise in comparative perspective: England and Wales, 1730-1914).

11.00–11.15: Coffee break

11.15–12.00: Mar Cuenca (Instituto de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia “López Piñero” (CSIC-UV), Spain), “Poisons, Experts and the Shaping of Nineteenth century Spanish Toxicology: the María Bonamot trial (1844-1847)”.

12.00–12.30: Discussion

13.00–14.15: Lunch

Session II

14.30–16.30 Chair: Stathis Arapostathis

14.30–15.15: Marina Loskutova (Institute for the history of science and technology, St. Petersburg branch), “Forests, climate, government and scientists: environmental expertise in the 19th century Russia”.

15.15–16.00: Ximo Guillem (Universitat de València, Spain), “The role of experts in food safety regulations. The Spanish Real Academia de Medicina and the limits of fraud”.

16.00–16.30: Discussion.

16.30–17.00 Coffee break

Key-note lecture

17.00 – 18.30 - Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds, UK), “Ethnicity, expertise and authority”

(Lecture opened to the general public)

18.30–19.30 Poster session. Chair: Mar Cuenca Lorente

Fraiser Joyce (Oxford Brookes University, UK), “Is ‘Expertise’ Relative? The Role of Lay and Medical Witnesses in the Context of Postmortem Identification Practices: England and Wales, 1800-1934”

Duygu Aysal (Bilkent University, Turkey), “Officials, Engineers and Experts in the Electrification of Ottoman Istanbul”

Nicholas Duvall (Manchester University, UK), “Cardboard Wounds and Missing Bodies: a case study in the history of gunshot wounds, and their investigation, in 1920s Scotland”

Nahomi Galindo-Malavé (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain), “Modern Crime, Prison and Health: The Birth of the First Women’s Penitentiary in Puerto Rico”

Friday December 2, 2011

Session III

9.30–12.00 Chair: Ximo Guillem    

9.30–10.15: Silke Fengler (University of Vienna, Austria), “Austrian Experts and the International Pugwash Movement”.

10.15–11.00: Darina Martykánová (Universität Potsdam, Germany), “Engineers in the Ottoman Empire: Expert Governmentalities during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1922)”.

11.00–11.15 Coffee break

11.15–12.00: Stathis Arapostathis (Cardiff University, UK), “Meters, Patents, and Expertise (s): Knowledge Networks in the Electric Meters Industry, 1880-1914”.

12.00–12.30: Discussion

13.00–14.15: Lunch

Session IV

15.00–17.00 Chair: Katherine Watson

15.00– 15.45: José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez (Universitat de València, Spain): “Chemistry, Microscopy and Smell: Bloodstains and Nineteenth-century Legal Medicine”

15.45–16.30: Ian Burney (University of Manchester, UK), “Spaces and Traces: The Making of Modern Crime Scene”

16.30–17.00: Discussion

17.00 Concluding remarks

(Christelle Rabier and Katherine Watson)

20.30 Meeting dinner

Organizing committee

Jose R. Bertomeu-Sánchez
Jose.R.Bertomeu@uv.es

Mar Cuenca Lorente
maria.mar.cuenca@uv.es

Ximo Guillem
Joaquim.Guillem@uv.es

[Abstracts, in «Ver documento»]