Robert Fox (historian)

Robert Fox 2013

Robert Fox (born October 7, 1938 ) is a British science historian and professor emeritus at Oxford University .

Fox studied physics from 1957 at Imperial College London and from 1958 at Oxford (Oriel College) with a bachelor's degree in 1961 and a master's degree in 1965, where he received his doctorate in 1967 with Alistair Cameron Crombie ( The study of the thermal properties of gases in relation to physical theory from Montgolfier to Regnault ). He was then a teacher at the Tonbridge School and from 1965 Research Fellow at Queen's College in Oxford. In 1966 he was Lecturer , 1975 Reader and 1987 Professor of History of Science at Lancaster University .

From 1986 to 1988 he was director of the Center de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie of the CNRS in Paris and in 1988 he became Assistant Director of the Science Museum in London.

From 1988 to 2006 he was Professor of the History of Science at Oxford University and Fellow of Linacre College. After his retirement he was visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University , East Carolina University , Oregon State University and the Czech National Technical University in Prague.

He is mainly concerned with the history of science and technology in Europe since the 18th century. One focus is France, the relationships between technology, industry and natural sciences in Europe in modern times and the international exchange of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2015 he received the George Sarton Medal and in 2017 the Koyré Medal for his complete works . He became an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in 2007. In 2013 he was a Gordon Cain Distinguished Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. In 1974 he became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 1989 a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London . From 1980 to 1982 he was President of the British Society of the History of Science and from 1993 to 1997 he was President of the History of Science Section of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, of which he was President from 1995 to 1997. From 2003 to 2006 he was President of the European Society for the History of Science. He is Knight of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (1998) and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2006). In 2004 he received the Oskar von Miller Gold Medal and in 1998 the Dickinson Medal of the Newcomen Society. In 1981 he became a corresponding and in 1986 a full member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences. In 1986 he received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University .

Fox edited the Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science .

Fonts

Books:

• The Caloric Theory of Gases from Lavoisier to Regnault, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971
• The Culture of Science in France 1700-1900, Aldershot: Variorum 1992
• Science, Industry and the Social Order in Post-Revolutionary France, Aldershot: Variorum 1995 (collection of articles by Fox et al .: Positivists, free thinkers and the reform of french science in the second empire)
• with Charles Coulston Gillispie , Ivor Grattan-Guinness : Pierre-Simon Laplace: 1749-1827: a life in exact science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edition 1997
• The Savant and the State. Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France, Johns Hopkins University Press 2012
• Science without frontiers. Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870-1940, Oregon State University Press 2016

Editing:

• Editor: Sadi Carnot. Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu, Manchester University Press 1978, 1986, 1988, 1992
• Editor with George Weisz: The Organization of Science and Technology in France 1808-1914, Cambridge University Press 1980 (therein by Fox: The savant confronts his peers: Scientific Societies in France 1815-1914)
• Editor with Anna Guagnini: Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe 1850-1939, Cambridge University Press 1993
• Editor: Technological Change ,: methods and themes in the history of technology, Amsterdam: Harwood 1996, 2nd edition 1998
• Editor with Anthony J. Turner: Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce, Aldershot 1998
• Editor with Agusti Nieto-Galan: Natural Dyestuffs and Industrial Culture in Europe, 1750-1880, Canton / Massachusetts, Science History Publications 1999
• Editor: Thomas Harriot. To Elizabethan Man of Science, 2000
• Editor with Graeme Gooday: Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 laboratories, learning, and college life, Oxford University Press 2005
• Editor with B. Joly: Franco-British Interactions in Science since the Seventeenth Century, 2010
• Editor: Thomas Harriot and his World. Mathematics, Exploration, and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England, Ashgate 2012
• Editor with Jed Z. Buchwald : Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics, Oxford University Press 2013

Some essays:

• The rise and fall of Laplacian physics, British Journal for the History of Science, Volume 4, 1975, pp. 89-136.
• Scientific Enterprise and the patronage of research in France 1800-1870, Minerva, Volume 11, 1973, pp. 442-473.
• Science, the university and the state in ninteenth-century France, in: Gerald Geison, Professions and the French State 1700-1900, University of Pennsylvania Press 1984, pp. 66-145.
• Science, Industry and Social Order in Mulhouse 1798-1871, British Journal of the History of Science, Volume 17, 1984, pp. 127-168.
• The view over the Rhine: perceptions of german science and technology in France 1860-1914, in: Y. Cohen, K. Manfrass, France and Germany, Munich: Beck 1990
• with A. Guagnini: Laboratories, Workshops and Sites: concepts and practices of research in industrial Europe, 1800-1914, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Volume 29, 1998, pp. 55-140, Volume 29, 1999, p 193-294.

Web links

• Homepage in Oxford
• Debretts
• Literature by and about Robert Fox (historian) in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Acknowledgment by the Chemical Heritage Foundation 2015 ( Memento of the original from July 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.