Earlier this year, the outgoing BJHS editor, Professor Charlotte Sleigh, announced three new initiatives for the journal:
- Science in Translation will provide open-access, English-language versions of texts whose translation would be of benefit to colleagues, and will link them with scholarly commentaries provided by their translators.
- Retrospectives will encourage senior scholars to reflect on their own experiences of how the discipline has developed over the course of their careers
- New Perspectives will identify key publications that bear re-examination, and possibly re-evaluation, in relation to the impact they (should have?) had on the field.
The incoming editor, Dr Amanda Rees, will build on these innovations by including them all within a new Forum section, which will also include Dialogues, an initiative intended to demonstrate the relevance of science’s history to society’s futures. Together with figures from science and industry, here historians will discuss topics such as the relevance of the history of radiology to the future of MRI scanning, for example, or the significance of the history of automation to developments surrounding AI – or even the question of how creativity is understood and nurtured by historians and scientists alike.
Interested members of the Society and readers of BJHS are warmly invited to suggest further topics, texts, interlocutors and authors for these new sections. Milestone texts and translations from non-Western languages are particularly welcome, and the texts identified and translated need not be restricted to research-based science: pedagogy, popularisation, fiction – all will be considered. Please get in touch with amanda.rees@york.ac.uk to discuss your ideas or if you have further questions/suggestions.
