Drawing on techniques from both laboratory and archival research, history professor Pamela Smith crosses the science/humanities divide and explores the surprising relationships between manuscripts and experiments; between today’s lab and yesterday’s workshop; and between early modern conceptions of nature and our own understanding of science, art, and scholarship.

Columbia University is an American private Ivy League research university located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the State of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States.