Evan Ragland, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, presents his research project, “Remaking the World: Experiment, Ambition, and the Good of Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe,” to an interdisciplinary group of NDIAS Fellows, guest faculty, and students.

Professor Ragland brings together intellectual and cultural history to study the emergence and spread of experimentation in pedagogical cultures and investigative networks, focusing on anatomy, chemistry, and clinical practice. He is currently revising a monograph on the development of a culture of experimental science in early modern Leiden, Experimental Life: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in Leiden, 1583-1688. His next project is a study of the ethics and moral goods of experimental practices in the development of new sciences in multiple sites in early modern Europe.

Ragland has published nine articles; a co-edited volume, Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy; and a co-edited special issue, Analysis and Synthesis in Early Modern Europe. His published work contributes to the long-term history of experience and experiment in natural philosophy, science, and medicine, as well as the history of the senses, chemical principles and methods, drug testing, clinical teaching and post-mortem dissection, and the historical debates over speculative philosophy.

His work has enjoyed support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, and the Edelstein Foundation.