Karl Hall

Karl Hall joined the Department of Historical Studies in 2003, where he teaches courses on Central and East European history of science and intellectual history. Trained at Harvard University as a historian of science, he has written primarily about Soviet physics, including the canonical Short Course of Landau and Lifshitz. With Michael D. Gordin and Alexei Kojevnikov he edited Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960 (Osiris, vol. 23). His research interests include industrial laboratories and tacit knowledge; intellectual property and patenting in Central and Eastern Europe, leading to chapters in a volume on Patent Cultures; post-1945 transformations of East European scientific institutions; Western scientists as anthropologists and critics of the Soviet experiment; the history of the race concept in imperial Russia; national cultural historiographies of science in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia (as well as Austria and Germany) before 1945. More recently he has reflected on the relation between science and Russian Orthodoxy. Boarding the digital humanities bandwagon, he is preparing a census of scientific mobility and disciplinary identity east of Paris in the century following the Vienna Congress.