David is a third-year student whose interests range widely (some might say wildly) across the history of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His primary subject is the global cane sugar trade, and in particular the environmental, economic, and scientific transformations wrought after 1860 to satisfy the world's desire for increasing purity and whiteness. In an MPhil dissertation at Cambridge, he showed how, to guarantee the purity of their product, sugar chemists and chemistry were forced to entangle themselves with the management of factories and labor.
In the future he hopes to pursue a project on the relationship between astronomical and economic theories and new forms of business and scientific organization.
At present, David is preparing for publication an article on John Maynard Keynes's probability, economics, moral philosophy, and their connection to his lifelong work on eugenics.
science and empire; environmental history; sugar; history of economic thought; history of physics, engineering, and astronomy; eugenics; science and sports
 |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
MIT HASTS Building E51-185 | 617-253-9759 | hasts@mit.edu |
