Evan Ragland

I am interested in the histories of science and medicine across most periods and places. More precisely, I study practices and ideas of experimentation in science and medicine in Early Modern Europe, especially the Low Countries. My current project, Experimental Life: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Leiden, examines the emergence of experimental culture in Leiden in the mid-seventeenth century, and the surprisingly long legacy of some of that culture into the nineteenth century. Most broadly, I hope to recover some of the importance of medicine for the histories of experimentation and natural philosophy. I have also worked on the history of the sense of taste in chemical medicine, Cartesianisms, and violence and disgust in early modern culture.

My courses cover the long history of science, from ancient locales through the seventeenth century, and then from the sixteenth century to select current topics. I teach specialized surveys of science and religion and pre-modern medicine, as well as courses with a more historiographic focus, examining experience and experiment or elite and 'popular' cultures.