The Seminar

In the academic year 2016/2017, Christian Forstner, Johannes-Geert Hagmann and Peter Heering started a course Material Culture in the History of Physics. This course addressed historians of science, museum staff and future physics teachers at the master and early graduate level. In this course, the students were introduced to object-oriented research, material culture studies, and experimental history of science. The course consisted of three phases: it started with an online seminar where the participants worked with introductory texts as well as case studies from the three fields. The second part was a seminar at the Deutsches Museum Munich where the participants had the opportunity to intensify and reflect the topics from the first part with practical activities. At the end of the second part, the participants used these techniques to study an object from the museum’s collection. This led directly into the third part; the students prepared an essay on the object they had analyzed. This essay served at the same time as the examination assignment.

This first course turned out to be very successful at least on three levels: The feedback of the participants, the satisfaction of the organizers, and the outcome in form of the essays. As a result, a slightly expanded course was offered in the following year, this time inviting international participation and it was therefore taught in English. Moreover, Richard Kremer fortunately agreed to participate in teaching this course. In 2022, the team was saddened by the untimely passing of Christian Forstner. That same year, Julia Bloemer agreed to add her expertise to the program. In 2023, Kristen Frederick-Frost stepped into Richard Kremer’s role. The course is currently taught by the lecturers Bloemer, Frederick-Frost, Hagmann and Heering.

Due to the quality of some essays, we decided to make them accessible to the public by offering the students the opportunity to publish their essays online. For this purpose, besides grading the essays, those which were submitted were also peer reviewed. As a result of this process, several papers from seven seminars were accepted for publication. These papers are found on this website.

If you want to refer to one of these papers, use a reference such as: [Author Name], [Title]; Preprint from the Workshop "Material Culture in the History of Physics" (YEAR), Deutsches Museum Munich; [link] [accessed]