Works in Progress

Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts

What histories are embedded in scientific instruments? Bringing together leading historians and curators, this volume approaches instruments as cultural artifacts: objects that embody the values, practices, forms of labor, and relations of power that have shaped science and technology. Taking the Yale Peabody Museum’s collection as its point of departure, its essays uncover unexpected connections between familiar objects and histories of colonialism, slavery, education, empire, race, gender, and global exchange. Together, they show how thinking through objects can bring into view histories that collections have preserved—and others that they have obscured.

Edited by Paola Bertucci and Alexi Baker

Yale University Press | Forthcoming 2027

I’m now working on a new book: The Compass of History. It is an impossible biography of a man who never existed, yet lived a long life on the printed page and beyond: Flavio Gioia from Amalfi, the legendary medieval inventor of the nautical compass. Created by a translation mistake in the 16th century, Flavio Gioia went on to live for five centuries in treatises on navigation, philosophical works, lunar maps, travel literature, and early timelines. A bronze monument representing Gioia greets tourists in Amalfi to this day, and lunar crater bears his name. By following Gioia across time and space, The Compass of History asks why fabricated pasts resist debunking and what their persistence reveals about the relationship between imagined pasts and possible futures.

Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts

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