Professor of History
B.A., Colgate University; M.A., Western Washington University; Ph.D., University of British Columbia
Kelly J. Whitmer’s research and teaching focuses on the history of science, technology, medicine and considers its intersections with the history of youth, education, religion and political economy in the early modern world. She studies the history of collections, natural history, scientific observation and future-focused forms of social experimentation and offers a range of courses at Sewanee, from seminars on collecting and empire (“Monsters, Marvels and Museums”) or “Youth and Social Networks” to an introductory level course on “Science, Society and the Archives.” Whitmer received funding for development of the latter from the Associated Colleges of the South to involve archivists, librarians, scientists and historians from across the Consortium in the course’s debut.
In her first book, The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c2015), Whitmer considered the Halle Orphanage (f. 1700) as a key institutional venue for the pursuit of collaborative scientific research, focusing specifically on the organization’s promotion of eclecticism as a tool for assimilating perspectives and becoming an able observer. She developed the project as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and received support from Sewanee and the Appalachian College Association to finish it. Whitmer's work on the Orphanage has been reviewed mostly recently in the American Historical Review, featured on the New Books Network, in an H-Ideas Blog focused on premodern Universities and in recent discussions about space and collections in Halle, Leipzig and Dresden.
Dr. Whitmer’s new book, Useful Natures: Science, Pedagogy and the Power of Youth in Early Modernity, focuses on a pivotal moment in the history of science when scholars, physicians, teachers, state leaders and administrators began drawing attention to links they observed between the potential uses of things found in nature and that of their young people. They began to call for intensified investigations of the young body, particularly its tendency to play and to move constantly and to deploy tools and materials strategically. Drawing much needed attention to science’s fascination with the power of the young, Useful Nature(s) highlights efforts to derive benefit from the young imagination, including its potential to dramatically reconfigure knowledge-making practices, notions of industriousness and communities.
Whitmer’s work on this project has been supported by a Herzog-Ernst-Scholarship at the Forschungszentrum Gotha (FZG) Universität Erfurt, a fellowship from the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Forschungsverbund (MWW) and, most recently, an extended fellowship for experienced researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. With colleagues from the Georg August University of Göttingen and the University of Hamburg she convened a workshop on “Object Pedagogies and Academic Collections in the History of Science'' (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation) in September 2021. Her new book project was featured in a segment of the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Academic Minute in 2020.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
2022 “Putting Play to Work: Collections of Realia and Useful Play in Early Modern Educational Reform Efforts,” in Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy, edited by Vera Keller and Anna Marie Roos (Turnhout: Brepols Techne Series, forthcoming)
2022 “Chapter Seven: Belief and Ideology,” in A Cultural History of Youth in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Adriana Benzaquen (London: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming)
2020 “Wunderkind, redefined: Jean-Philippe Baratier and Halle’s culture of innovation, c. 1700,” in Innovationsuniversität Halle? Neuheit und Innovation als historische und als historiographische Kategorien, edited by Daniel Fulda and Andreas Pecar (Berlin/Munich/Boston: DeGruyter), 105-126
2019 “Reimagining the ‘nature of children’: Realia, reform and the turn to pedagogical realism in central Europe, c. 1600 – 1700,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12, 113-35
2018 “Projects and pedagogical expectations: Inside P.J. Marperger’s ‘Golden Clover Leaf’ (Trifolium), 1700-1730,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science Special Issue 72, 139-57
2018 “Botany as a Science of Perfection: Observation, Examples and Vollkommenheit in Johann Julius Hecker’s Einleitung in der Botanic (1734)” in Perfektionismus und Perfektionismus und Perfektibilität. Sollzustände in Pietismus und Aufklärung. Studien zum 18.Jahrhundert, edited by Christian Soboth and Konstanze Baron (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag), 201-12
2017 “Imagining Uses for Things: Teaching ‘Useful Knowledge’ in the Early Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 55, 37-60
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Early Modern Europe, Germany, Atlantic World
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology; History of Scientific Observation, Collections
History of Youth and Childhood
History of Education
