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Londa Schiebinger

Londa Schiebinger 2011

Londa Schiebinger

Professor of History
The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Director, EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project
Director, Graduate Studies
Field: 
Early Modern Europe
History of Science
Modern Europe
Ph.D. Harvard University

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University, Director of Graduate Studies,  and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender and science.  Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.

Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the finding at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. The UN Resolutions of March 2011 call for "gender-based analysis ... in science and technology" and for the integrations of a "gender perspective in science and technology curricula."

She has worked with the European Commission on a number of projects. January 2011 she entered into a major collaboration with the European Union to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the US, Europe and now Asia. The project was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013. Schiebinger has also addressed the Korean National Assembly (2014). In 2015, she addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research, development, and business.

Schiebinger recently moderated the American Association of University Women's launch of Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in Engineering and Computing at Samsung's Mountain View Campus (2015). Schiebinger also helped launch the League of European Research Universities’s major report Gendered Research & Innovation, Brussels (2015).

Her study, "Housework is an Academic Issue," with Shannon Gilmartin, Academe (Jan/Feb. 2010): 39-44, was profiled on ABC News.   A 30-minute interview on gender in science can be seen on  Belgian television.  

Schiebinger's work in the eighteenth century investigates colonial science in the Atlantic World. In particular she explores medical experimentation with slave populations in the Caribbean. Her project reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Schiebinger has just been appointed a Distinguished Affiliated Professor at the Technical University—the only humanist so honored. She has also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, the Jantine Tammes Chair in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Groningen, a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, and the Maria Goeppert-Meyer Distinguished Visitor, Oldenburg University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Commission, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Londa Schiebinger was  awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2013 ; the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award from Women's Health at Stanford Medical School, 2010; 2005 Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association; and the 2005 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society both for her Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. She also won the 2005 J. Worth Estes Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine for her article "Feminist History of Colonial Science," Hypatia 19 (2004): 233-254. This prize goes to the author of an article of outstanding scholarly merit in the history of pharmacology. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Londa Schiebinger's research has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift, La Vanguardia, El País, DiscovHer, EuroScientist, University World News, at the London Museum of Natural History, on NPR, and elsewhere. She speaks and consults nationally and internationally on issues surrounding women and gender in science, medicine, and engineering.

Schiebinger is currently accepting graduate students in History of the Atlantic World and Gender in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment.

Selected Publications & Projects

Londa Schiebinger
The question of gender in science and technology is pursued by scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: historians study the lives of...
Londa Schiebinger
Gendered Innovations harness the creative power of sex and gender analysis to discover new things.
The peer-reviewed Gendered...

Pages

More Information

2008: Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know  with Andrea Davies Henderson and Shannon K. Gilmartin (Stanford: Clayman Institute for Gender Research).

2005: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (University of Pennsylvania Press); paperback 2007.

2004: Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press). Foreign Translation: Japanese (Kosakusha Publishing Co., in progress). Winner of the Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Association,

2005, and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, French Colonial Historical Society, 2005.

2004: Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press)--new edition.

2001: Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (University of Chicago Press).

2001: Oxford Companion to the Body, edited by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett; Section editors Alan Cuthbert, the late Roy Porter, Tom Sears, Londa Schiebinger, and Tilli Tansey (Oxford University Press).

2000: Feminism and the Body, edited by Londa Schiebinger; a collection of essays by Janet Browne, Sander Gilman, Lynn Hunt, Thomas Laqueur, Marina Warner, and others (Oxford University Press).

1999: Has Feminism Changed Science? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foreign Translations: Japanese (Kosakusha Publishing Co., 2002); German (München: Beck Verlag, 2000); Portuguese (Editora da Universidade do Sagrado Coração, 2001); Korean (Dulnyouk Publishing Co., 2002).

1993: Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press). Foreign Translations: Japanese (Tokyo: Kosakusha Publishing Co., 1996); German (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1995); and Hungarian (in preparation). Winner of the Ludwik Fleck Book Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science, 1995.

1989: The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Foreign Translations: Japanese (Tokyo: Kosakusha Publishing Co., 1992); German (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1993); Chinese (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing); Portuguese (Lisbon: Pandora Ediçioes, 2001); and Greek (Athens: Katoptro, 2003).

"Housework is an Academic Issue," with Shannon Gilmartin, Academe (Jan/Feb. 2010): 39- 44.

Editor, Forum, Isis, Journal of the History of Science Society, 96 (2005):52-87 on "Colonial Science" with articles on Britain by Mark Harrison, Iberia by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the Jesuits by Steven J. Harris, and France by Michael A. Osborne.

Editor, article cluster for Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2003):859-922 on "Feminism Inside the Sciences" with articles on physics (by Amy Bug), archaeology (by Margaret W. Conkey), and evolutionary biology (by Patricia Adair Gowaty).

Editor, special section, Science in Context, 15 (2002):473-576 on "European Women in Science" with articles on France by Claudine Hermann and Françoise Cyrot-Lackmann, on Germany by Ilse Costas, and the Netherlands by Mineke Bo.