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The HPS Seminar Series
The HPS program at the University of Melbourne conducts a weekly seminar series each academic semester. Seminars vary across a broad range of topics and are presented by local and international scholars. Click below to subscribe to the seminar mailing list.
Seminars 2026
Semester 1
Wednesday 11 March,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Interdisciplinary and the Modern Paradox: Chaos across history, philosophy and science
Fiona Druitt, University of Melbourne
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This talk will discuss my forthcoming book (to be published later this year by Palgrave MacMillan) Interdisciplinary and the Modern Paradox: Chaos across history, philosophy and science. It begins by explaining my ‘doubly-diasporic’ relationship to modern disciplinarity, or to science and the humanities, as a student and then scholar belonging to each of these disciplines simultaneously. This situation (or really two distinct, but not unrelated, situations that never quite came together or apart as modern disciplinarity or history promised) led me to a dilemma from which I could neither ‘move on’ from nor ‘back out of’ – in two directions at once.
The problem of translating ‘chaos’ across the modern disciplines of history, philosophy and mathematics is one example of this kind of dilemma. By ‘chaos’, here I mean the mathematical phenomena inaptly and colloquially know as ‘chaos’ (or nonlinear dynamics), and which for mathematics, is not just a theory, as it is often called, but a materiality (embodying things).
My research responds to the problem of being modern (and of the modern paradoxes of translating chaos, which I will describe) by reposing the question of being modern (as described, for example, by Foucault in The Order of Things and by Latour, in We have never been Modern). It does this by asking how being modern ruptures, reimagines and recombines space and disciplinarity, just as it does for time and history. This spatiotemporal critique, which I call ‘nonlinear critique’, reposes the problem of being modern as a nonlinear, double-crossing or ‘chiasm’, rather than as a linear crossing or ‘dualism’ of nature and culture (and all other modern binaries). Foucault’s critique of Kant reveals how the problem of being modern can no longer take the form of a dualism or a linear crossing as it did for Descartes in (what Foucault defines as) classical scholarship.
The talk, like the book, then performs nonlinear critique to double-cross chaos across history, philosophy and mathematics, with a view to revealing how these three disciplines of chaos can be understood simultaneously across science and the humanities and the stories they each tell about the past; what the mathematics of chaos is and does; how chaos has never been modern; how complexity theory got the mathematics of chaos and its Newtonian history wrong according to mathematics; how mathematics’ history of mathematics refuses to be modern in some quite delightful ways across time and space; and what being modern does to disciplinarity (or what demarcates ‘science’ from ‘the humanities’ in terms of modern foundationalisms, or questions that drop out of the question). Oh, and, how to no longer unsee, but no longer be doubly-diasporic – or, in other words, how to no longer be modern.
Fiona Druitt has an entirely circumstantial (but now entirely unwavering) scholarly habit of being in two places at once across modern disciplines, modern histories, and modern binaries. Her research crosses the fields of Australian cultural studies, critical theory, feminist philosophy, queer theory, continental philosophy, STS, sociology, and histories and philosophies of science with modern science (in particular, mathematics, physics and biology). The thread that connects these topics and fields in her research is the question of being modern, and in particular, what being modern does (and what it has never done) to space and disciplinarity, as well as to time and history. Dr Druitt’s work holds important implications for reconceptualising questions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinary methods; for reposing questions of humanism and naturalism, nature and culture, humans and technology, research and practice, identity and difference and science and society (to name only a few modern binaries in what could be a much longer list); for the science wars, history wars and culture wars; and for reframing how critical theory can respond to seemingly intractable problems of modern foundations and modern binaries. Dr Druitt currently holds appointments as a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at The University of Melbourne, and as an Adjunct Research Fellow at Victoria University.
Wednesday 18 March,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Natural classification and the rise of systematics 1735-1900
John Wilkins, University of Melbourne
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From the first edition of the Systema Nature by Linnaeus in 1735, naturalists have used the term “system” to mean an artificial arrangement of species and genera; or a systematic account of groups of plants of animals; or a natural classification. This term, along with “method” have deep and confusing connotations, which makes debates since then hard to track, and stand in contrast to the twentieth century definitions of “taxonomy” and “systematics”. In this talk I will cover some of the prominent views of naturalists up to the turn of the twentieth century, as a prelude to a later talk and paper on how systematics became a contended term after then. [NB: The research is from a joint paper with Assoc. Prof. Aleta Quinn of the University of Idaho]
John Wilkins did his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He has researched and taught at the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Melbourne. He has published several books: Species: A History of the Idea (2009, the first edition of this book, the second of which is Species: The Evolution of the Idea 2018), Defining Species (2009), The Nature of Classification (2013, with Malte C. Ebach), and edited Intelligent design and religion as a natural phenomenon (2010). He co-editied: Species and Beyond for CRC Press (2022) John is currently an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.
Wednesday 25 March,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Testing the Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation Theory of Theory Building (IBET)
Peter Sedon, University of Melbourne
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 1 April,12:00–13:00, Online
Piratical Knowledge and the Making of the Darwinian Revolution
Henry-James Meiring, University of Queensland
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This paper explores the category of piratical knowledge in nineteenth-century science by examining the role of the American print industry in the global circulation of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. Focused on Darwin’s seminal work, Descent of Man (1871), the study traces the book from its birth in John Murray’s London publishing house to New York, and its subsequent mass reprinting at the hands of print pirates during America’s Gilded Age. Between 1871 and 1900, more than a dozen American publishers engaged in the unauthorised printing of Darwin's book in various shapes and sizes. These inexpensive pirated copies reached new and diverse readerships across the country and in turn were—legally as well as illegally—exported all over the world. Moreover, Descent of Man became entangled in the Cheap Books Movement and legal disputes over international copyright laws between Britain and America. By viewing Descent of Man’s reception through its movement as both a material object and cross-cultural transaction, I show that piracy was not peripheral to the “Darwinian Revolution” but rather a central force in the dissemination of Darwinism across the globe. The study of piratical knowledge, therefore, enlarges our picture of the development of science, by fundamentally altering our understanding of how scientific knowledge was produced and consumed on a global scale.
Henry-James Meiring is a historian of science whose scholarship is situated at the intersection of science and print culture in the nineteenth century. His work in particular focuses on how reading practices and the materiality of texts came to shape readers understanding of what it meant to be human. He is currently a Lecturer in History at The University of Queensland, having previously held visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge, Uppsala University, and the University of Oklahoma. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals such as Isis and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, as well as in public-facing outlets including The Conversation. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Volume 17 of The Correspondence of John Tyndall (University of Pittsburgh Press).
Wednesday 15 April,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Title [TBD]
Jacinthe Flore, University of Melbourne
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 22 April,12:00–13:00, Online
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Manuela Fernández Pinto, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 29 April,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 6 May,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Title [TBD]
Fallon Mody, University of Melbourne
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 13 May,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
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Matthew Champion, University of Melbourne
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Abstract [TBD]
Wednesday 20 May,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
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Wednesday 27 May,12:00–13:00, Old Arts, Room 239
Title [TBD]
Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, University of Melbourne
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Abstract [TBD]
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