Vera Keller

Vera Keller (AB Harvard, PhD Princeton, 2008) is a historian of science specializing in the transnational early modern study of nature and its interaction with political theory and practice. She has published or has articles forthcoming in History of Science, British Journal for the History of Science, Journal of the History of Ideas, Ambix, Early Science and Medicine, Isis, William and Mary Quarterly, and Nuncius. She serves on the international editorial board of two journals and has been invited to speak at Harvard, Oxford, the Warburg Institute, the Linnean Society (London), Munich, and Bucharest. She has won numerous national and international scholarships and has been a Fellow at the Making Publics Project in McGill, the Early Modern Studies Institute at USC/the Huntington, the Warburg Institute in London, the Duke August Library in Wolfenbüttel, the Research Center of Gotha/Erfurt, and the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU Munich.

Professor Keller is currently completing her first book, The Wish List: Collecting the Future in the Early Modern Past. The Wish List examines early modern lists of ancient, modern, and not-yet-discovered inventions from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. A series of connected micro-histories, the Wish List traces how such techniques shaped concepts of epistemic change and how they did and did not succeed in forming collaborqative research agendas across Europe. Preliminary articles include Accounting for Invention: Guido Pancirolli's Lost and Found Things and the Development of Desiderata," Journal of the History of Ideas 73:2 (April, 2012), 223-245 and "The 'New World of Sciences': The Temporality of the Research Agenda and the Unending Ambitions of Science," (Focus Section), Isis, (forthcoming in December, 2012).

A short, animated version of Professor Keller's wish list research can be seen here:

Inside the Renaissance: The Promise of Invention from Early Modern Studies Institute on Vimeo.

An interview with CBC radio concerning the idea of the "public" and its relationship to Professor Keller's research on the once famous Cornelis Drebbel can be heard here:

Episodes 1 ("An Introduction to Modern Publics and to the early modern period") and 10 ("Science and its Publics") of David Cayley's "The Origins of the Modern Public" series on CBC radio.