Katharine Park

Katharine Park is the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science Emerita at Harvard University. Professor Park received her A.B. in History and Literature of the Renaissance and Reformation at Radcliffe College, her M.Phil in Combined Historical Studies of the Renaissance at the University of London, and her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the History of Science. Her research and teaching has focused on the history of science and medicine in medieval and early modern Europe, with special attention to gender, sexuality, and the history of the body.  Her work stresses the interconnection of knowledge and practice and the importance of relating both to the social, institutional, and cultural contexts that produced them. Her books include,Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985); Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-175 (1997), co-authored with Lorraine Daston; and Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2007). She also co-edited The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, with Lorraine Daston. She is currently working on a book, co-authored with Ahmed Ragab, A New History of Medieval Science, premised on the fact that Greek, Arabic, and Latin science were contemporary and in ongoing communication with one another throughout the medieval period, rather than three separate phases in a linear development that culminated in the "birth of modern science" in early modern Europe. She is a recipient of the Sarton Medal, the  Pfizer Prize, and the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize of the History of Science Society and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine.