Department of History

Kathryn Olesko was educated in physics and mathematics as an undergraduate and then turned to history of science, European intellectual history and German history for her doctorate. Before coming to Georgetown, she taught at Clarkson University. She has held visiting positions at Cornell and Princeton, and was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. She teaches courses in history of science, German history, European intellectual history, and European Civilization. She has held several administrative positions including Director the Master of Arts in German & European Studies Program, Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Center for the Environment. She is Past Editor of Osiris and Past Associate Editor of Isis, the two major American journals for the history of science. Her awards include fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, The Huntington Library, and Georgetown University. Her main research interest is the history of science and technology in western civilization since the seventeenth century, especially science and technology in Germany, science pedagogy, rationality in daily life, and quantification and measurement in science and daily life. In 1998 she was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for contributions to scholarship and teaching in the history of science and for leadership in AAAS and the History of Science Society.”