The UAH history department is delighted to welcome our new colleague, Evan Ragland, who will begin teaching for us in fall semester 2011, focusing in his upper-level coursework on the history of science and technology.
Evan earned his B.S. in history and mathematics from Hillsdale College, his M.A. from Indiana University in the History and Philosophy of Science, and will receive his PhD. from Indiana. At IU, he studied the history and philosophy of science from ancient cultures to current policy, specializing in early-modern science and medicine. His dissertation reconstructs the history of chymico-anatomical experimentation in research on digestion and disease from seventeenth-century Leiden in the Netherlands to the nineteenth-century scientific medicine of Claude Bernard. He has long-term interests in the history of experiment, the relations between science and medicine, and the complex interaction of science and religion. Also at Indiana, he taught undergraduate courses in the history of science and the history of science and Christianity.
The history of alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry also intrigues him, and he has worked on Isaac Newton's chymical manuscripts, transcribing and encoding a portion of the roughly one million words Newton wrote on the subject. Along with this textual work, he was part of a team re-creating some of Newton's chymical recipes. He has done archival research in London, Amsterdam, Leiden, Den Haag, and Delft. He loved his stay in the Netherlands, and has published on early-modern Dutch medical experimentation in Early Science and Medicine. Most recently, he received the 2011 Partington Prize from the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.
At UAH, he will enjoy teaching world history, as well as the history of science, technology, and medicine. So far, he usually prefers the life of a historian to his previous jobs as a mover, retail clerk, factory worker, and IT assistant. When he's not researching or writing, Evan loves spending time with his wife, Zoe, and daughter, Charlotte.
