I went to Denver in November for the 31st annual Supercomputer Conference in support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison booth on the main exhibition floor. Nearly 14,000 people attended this event, including many UW alums whose work involved high performance and throughput computing. Having prior experience in this field along with my historian sensibilities helped me to prepare various documents for display at the booth related to past UW activities in this highly technical realm.
In September I gave my department’s first History of Science Colloquium talk for the fall semester. Here I expanded on my summer HSS talk with the new title “Practicing what they Preach: The Bachelor of Science degree in Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Higher Education.”
Summer found me in The Netherlands for a pair of geographically and chronologically adjacent conferences. The first event, the 28th International Conference on the History of Cartography, took place in Amsterdam where I enjoyed the numerous good talks, fun evening social events, and assisting at the History of Cartography Project display table. The next gathering was the annual History of Science Society conference held in Utrecht where I helped to organize a session on science education along with presenting a dissertation-related talk titled “The B.S. Degree: A New Objective in Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Higher Education.”
The 14th Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop held at Notre Dame University in June gave me a chance to present a dissertation-related poster titled “James Curley, S.J., a Jesuit ‘comet’ in Nineteenth-Century American Astronomy.” For someone who enjoys science, technology, religion, Japan, astronomy, and all things in between, these many gatherings were useful and informative.
I was in Washington, D.C., in April for a one-day conference titled Religion and Innovation held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Two months later I returned to D.C. to attend the 24th “Science in Japan” Forum organized by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (or JSPS) on the theme of “New Eyes on the Universe,” a one-day event featuring two sessions about multi-messenger astronomy: gravity waves and cosmic rays.