Margaret Carlyle's research focuses on the production of scientific, medical, and technological knowledge in seventeenth- and eigheenth-century France and its colonies. She is particularly interested in the enterprising efforts of women and other "invisible assistants" in forging scientific careers, both outside of and within institutional settings. Margaret is currently completing two projects. The first is a cultural history of Enlightenment anatomy stemming from her doctoral thesis completed at McGill University (2013). The second is a history of obstetrical technology in early modern Europe. Margaret has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013–15) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota (2015–17). 

Damien Droney received his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, where his research focused on the politics of science, technology, and medicine in postcolonial Africa. While at SIFK he will be revising his dissertation as a book manuscript to be titled Weedy Science: The Meaning of Science in Postcolonial Ghana. The book is an ethnographic study of Ghana’s herbal medicine sector, with a focus on political projects of class, race, and nation that shape the vocation of science in the West African nation of Ghana.

Eduardo A. Escobar is a historian and Assyriologist whose research focuses on cuneiform scholarly cultures of the ancient Middle East. At SIFK he will teach courses on Babylonian knowledge, historiography, and on scientific knowledge in the premodern world. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication; entitled “Technology as Knowledge: Cuneiform Technical Recipes and the Material World,” this work details the central role technology played in the construction of scribal knowledge. He recently received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and holds degrees from Columbia University, and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Stuart M. McManus is an historian of global empire with a particular focus on Latin America and Iberian Asia.  He received his PhD in history from Harvard in 2016.  His first book project, “Empire of Eloquence: Humanism and Iberian Global Expansion,” argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a key technology of empire and evangelization in the early modern Americas and Asia that can be only understood fully by taking a global perspective. At SIFK, he will be teaching courses on Mexico and the Iberian world.