Personalia
Dániel Margócsy, born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. Ph.D. from Harvard University, USA. Associate Professor at Hunter College – CUNY, USA.
Theme Group Fellow (April – June 2016)
Science and Urban Policy in Amsterdam: Technology Transfer in the Age of Nicolaes Witsen
Research Question
How do politics and science interact at the urban level?
Project Description
How do politics and science interact at the urban level? It is widely agreed that urbanization played a key role in the development of early modern economy, and that it also contributed to the circulation and production of knowledge in the scientific revolution. Yet historians tend to consider urbanization as an organic process with little consideration of urban policy as a key component of development. My contribution investigates how key players in urban politics (burgomasters, mayors and other politicians) considered science and technology as tools for developing their cities. While there is an abundant historiography on the scientific policies of early modern states, we still know very little of how urban policies were influenced by contemporary technoscience.
Selected Publications
2014 Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reviewed in ArtsFuse, CHOICE. Chronicle for Higher Education,
Endeavour, Metascience, Seventeenth-Century News.
2012 States of Secrecy: An Introduction. Co-authored with Koen Vermeir, published in the British Journal for the History of Science.
2011 A Museum of Wonders or a Cemetery of Corpses? The Commercial Exchange of Anatomical Collections in Early Modern Netherlands. in: Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy (eds). Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries. Berlin: LIT. 185-216.