Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Ocean Laboratory: Exploration, Fieldwork, and Science at Sea

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports research in history of technology. The project focuses on the changing role of maritime technology as scientific instruments in oceanographic fieldwork between 1870 and 1930. The central theme of the work is the changing conception of the research vessel over this period, as it underwent a change from the ship as instrument, to the ship as laboratory, and finally, in its most recent incarnation, to the ship as invisible technician operating within an ocean transformed into credible scientific space. The plan is to develop a comparative study of marine expeditions and scientific correspondence of naturalists from the United States, France, and Britain. The grant supports archival research at various locations in these three countries. Intellectual Merit Most histories of the field sciences treat terrestrial topics, rather than marine ones. However, the abstract notion of ?the field? has been applied to marine environments. While the importance of laboratories as a space for scientific work has been well established by historians, and though there has been a growing body of recent scholarship on the history of field science, the link between ships, laboratories, and the development of oceanography as a field science has yet to be fully explored. Tracing this history will serve to set the history of oceanography within the larger history of science in the field and thereby offer to the history of science a contribution that bridges two subfields, the history of the development of laboratory and field sciences and the history of the exploration of the marine environment. Broader Impact This study will sheds light on the social and cultural processes involved in the emergence of global sciences framed in terms of large-scale systems, both physical and political. By tracing the development of oceans as scientific spaces, this work will demonstrate how the idea of a "Pacific World," with roots in nineteenth-century expeditionary science, contributed to the self-conscious geopolitical construction of this concept in the interwar period. Public proclamations about the Pacific World, along with the development of museum exhibits focused on marine science and interpreting the results of oceanographic expeditions, demonstrate the ways in which popular culture and politics interacted with the cultures of marine science.