Laura Sellers

In January 2017 the centre for HPS at Leeds hosted “Past, Present and Future of iHPS: an International Postgraduate Workshop”this was a two day event where all of our speakers, with the exceptions of the keynotes were postgraduates or early career researchers. I was involved in organising this event with my friends and colleagues Konstantin Kiprijanov, Emily Herring and Kevin Jones. We wanted to clarify what integrated history and philosophy of science is and what was going on in the field. There are, to the best of our knowledge, no post graduate events focused on iHPS so we thought we’d fill the void.

We were absolutely thrilled that our call for papers was well received and we were sent fascinating abstracts, literally from all over the world. We felt reassured that iHPS is a thriving community, but it is a bit disparate in terms of communication. Very few universities have centres for HPS so most iHPS scholars are in other departments or faculties, often on their own. We ended up with 23 amazing papers, which forced us to have parallel sessions. We had intended to avoid this but we could find no good way to cut down the number of speakers we were excited to hear. Our keynotes were Jon Hodge and Chiara Ambrosia, both of whom reflected on what we can learn from the past of iHPS, but were beyond excited about the future of the discipline, which is broad, varied and difficult to put boundaries on (which can only be a good thing?)

I’m not going to go through every paper as each was as interesting as the last, were hoping to produce a book of some of the papers so keep an eye out for that! If you’re interested in iHPS, or would like to see the programme or videos of our keynotes you can visit our website or find us on twitter @ihpsleeds