Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin was trained as a biologist at Reed College and did graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin before taking a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.

From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field’s approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.

Books in order of publication:

Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; new edition 2011), with Simon Schaffer.

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; 2nd edition, with new Bibliographic Essay, 2018).

Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited with Christopher Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Made by People with Bodies, Situated in Space, Time, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).