HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Katharine Park Named to Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professorship

By Liz Brown-Lavoie

Special to the Gazette

Katharine Park, a leading scholar in the history of science and in issues of gender and women, has been appointed the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Her joint appointment in the Department of the History of Science and the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies was approved by the Governing Boards this week and will begin on July 1.

Park, currently a professor of history at Wellesley College, said the chance to strengthen the ties between two dynamic areas at Harvard is one of the most exciting aspects of this position.

"Harvard has a remarkable faculty in both history of science and women's studies, and I am very honored to join them," she said. "My own research on changing conceptions of the human body in medieval and early modern scientific, artistic, and religious culture has long bridged these and other fields. I look forward to bringing this interdisciplinary focus to my teaching."

Park has been part of the Wellesley faculty since 1980. During the spring of 1990, she was a visiting associate professor at Princeton University, and she was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in 1991-92.

She graduated from Radcliffe in 1972 and earned her Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard in 1981; she was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1977-80.

Her publications, which include Doctors and Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985) and the forthcoming Wonders and the Order of Nature, have been noted for their deep scholarship and originality.

Peter Galison, chair of the Department of the History of Science, said students and faculty from the many subjects touched by Park's work are counting the weeks until she arrives.

"Rarely does anyone combine the skills of the intellectual, cultural, and social historian. Katharine Park does," said Galison. "From her studies of Renaissance doctors and the history of premodern faculty psychology to her recent cultural-historical inquiries, Park's work has transformed the fields she has touched. She has found a strikingly novel way of combining the history of science and women's studies -- by undertaking nothing short of a complete reassessment of all the dissection practices of the Renaissance."

Park will be the second senior faculty appointment in women's studies (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a joint appointment with the Department of History, was the first) and, according to Professor Alice Jardine, she will be an extremely important member of the women's studies community.

"Not only will Professor Park be closely involved with the shaping of our program over the next decade, she will undoubtedly be influential in bringing the sciences into closer dialogue with the humanities and social sciences at Harvard," said Jardine, chair of the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies.

"We are particularly excited about being able to offer our students a sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis of issues at the intersections of gender, science, and technology," she added. "This kind of analysis has been in demand for many years at Harvard, especially among our concentrators going on to medical school."

Colleagues have also praised Park for her commitment to teaching and the sincere personal interest she takes in undergraduate and graduate students.

Park succeeds Emily Vermeule, a professor of the classics who retired in 1994 after serving as the Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor since 1970.

Samuel Zemurray established the professorship in 1947 in memory of his son, Samuel Zemurray Jr., who was killed in North Africa in 1943, and in honor of his daughter, Doris Zemurray Stone, who graduated from Radcliffe in 1930 and who served on the board of trustees of Radcliffe College from 1941 to 1953 and again from 1968 to 1980.

In accordance with the terms of the professorship, a woman scholar from any field of knowledge may be selected for this appointment.

Radcliffe College President Linda S. Wilson speculated that Doris Zemurray Stone would have been delighted with Park's appointment.

"Doris was an intrepid archaeologist and ethnologist who specialized in the history and culture of Central America," Wilson said. "Dr. Park's scholarship, particularly her work on gender issues in medicine during the Renaissance, is intriguing to us all. I am sure that Doris would be very pleased to know that her name is associated with such a distinguished scholar and teacher."