The Spirit of Inquiry Conference Papers

June 7-8, 2018

Conference papers can be found below.  You will be required to enter a password provided by conference organizers to access them. Please contact the APS at [email protected] if you are attending the conference but have not yet received the password.

Papers are not to be cited or circulated without the written permission of the author.

Panel 1: Knowledge Networks

"Mr. Jefferson, Hispanophile: Thomas Jefferson and Spanish Imperial Geography"
Matthew Franco, College of William and Mary

"Lost in Translation: David Bailie Warden and the Limits to Franco-Jeffersonian Cultural Exchange"
Joseph Eaton, National Chengchi University

"Enlightened Networks: Thomas Jefferson's System for Working from Home"
Diane Ehrenpreis and Endrina Tay, Monticello

Comment: Barbara Oberg, Princeton University


Panel 2: Institutions of Knowledge

"A Useful Cabinet: Collecting and Circulating Objects at the American Philosophical Society"
Reed Gochberg, Harvard University

"The American Philosophical Society, 1743-1746: From Founding to Failure"
Paul Sivitz, Idaho State University

"Every Child a Philosopher: The Science of Education and the Teaching of Arithmetic in the Early Republic"
Timothy Minella, Villanova University

Comment: Babak Ashrafi, Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine


Panel 3: Science and Religion in Jefferson’s America

Sponsored by the  Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

“Enlightened Judaism: Transatlantic Intellectualism & Polite Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania"
Jonathon Awtrey, Louisiana State University

"Vis Medicatrix: Medical Vitalism and Religious Infidelity in the Age of Jefferson”
Kirsten Fischer, University of Minnesota

"On the Margins: Christian Rabbinic Scholarship in 18th-Century America”
Arthur Kiron, University of Pennsylvania

Comment by: Kyle Roberts, Loyola University Chicago


Panel 4: Useful Knowledge

"Thomas Jefferson, Military Technology, and the State"
Andrew Fagal, Princeton University

"Design by 'considerable degree': Jefferson's Architecture as Applied Science"
Danielle Willkens, Auburn University

"Thomas Jefferson, Inoculation, and the Norfolk Riots"
Andrew Wehrman, Central Michigan University

Comment: J. Jefferson Looney, Daniel P. Jordan Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello


Panel 5: Negotiating Knowledge

"André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the 'Injunction of Science'"
Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University

"Containing the Flow of Animal Magnetism: Franklin, Jefferson, and the Mesmer Report"
Philipp Ziesche, Yale University

"Thomas Jefferson's Audiences: Charles Thomson and the Transformation of Notes on the State of Virginia"
Cara Rogers, Rice University

Comment: Richard Shiffrin, Indiana University