School of History, Philosophy, and Religion

Mary Jo Nye (Oregon State University) has won the 2017 Abraham Pais Prize for the History of Physics. The Pais Prize is given annually by the American Physical Society (APS), with the American Institute of Physics, to recognize outstanding scholarly achievements in the history of physics. In the citation by Richard Staley, we are reminded that, for decades, Dr. Nye has “produced pathbreaking and enduring studies of the physical sciences that are distinguished equally by their attention to the coherence and integrity of the approaches taken by individual scientists…”

She is the past president of the HSS (1988- 1989), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Member of the International Academy of the History of Science. She delivered the HSS Distinguished Lecture in 2000 and won the Society’s Sarton Medal in 2006. She received the Pais Prize at the March 2017 meeting of the APS.

As part of the 35th annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration, the OMA was honored to collaborate with Diversity & Cultural Engagement, University Housing and Dining Services, and the School of History, Philosophy, & Religion, to organize the event “Speaking Justice” – a night of spoken word poetry by the OSU community and our feature artist, TOO BLACK, on Wednesday, January 18, 2017. And, in addition to the performance, the OMA was delighted to host the workshop “History of Race Relations at OSU” facilitated by TOO BLACK.

Workshop and Performance

Associate professor Christopher McKnight Nichols has been named director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities. The Center for the Humanities is an interdisciplinary research center with the primary mission of advancing the vitality and quality of humanities research at OSU. Nichols assumed his new role Jan. 1; he succeeds David Robinson, Oregon Professor of English at OSU, who retired in December after leading the center for more than 15 years.

Read more here.

Check out this GT article about his thoughts on Corvallis joining the sanctuary city movement.

Listen to an interview with Prof. Christopher McKnight Nichols, where he talks about the dilemmas facing the United States in the world, the shortcomings of existing foreign policy approaches, and his attempted rehabilitation of an idealistic isolationism to guide the United States in the future.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is the recipient of this year’s Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for his 2013 book, “Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism.” The prize, given by the History of Science Society, is awarded annually to “the author of a book useful in undergraduate teaching or which promotes public understanding of the history of science.”

Hamblin is a professor of history at Oregon State University. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Salon and publications devoted to the history of science, technology and the natural world.

His book traces postwar American scientists; roles in facilitating the study of ecosystems for military purposes. The prize committee called Hamblin’s book “an outstanding example of what interdisciplinary research and writing for a broad audience can achieve.” Hamblin is also the author of “Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age,” and “Oceanographers and the Cold War.”

His current research is based on work he’s done at the International Atomic Energy Agency in which he will look at the global promotion of nuclear ‘solutions’ especially in the developing world, from 1945 to the present.

The award was announced Nov. 5 at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Atlanta, GA.