What is research? This is a question tackled by College of Arts and Sciences history professor and Norman Brown Faculty Fellow Vera Keller in her now award-winning 2024 book, “Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century.”
Keller’s book received the prestigious Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society recognizing an outstanding book dealing with the history of science.
"This is such a wonderful award to win because of the scholarly community that stands behind it," Keller said. "The history of science is an incredibly vibrant field. Being recognized in this way is really overwhelming."
Previous views of the development of research have painted it as a component of politics and business, according to Keller. Academics played a surprisingly limited role in the construction of research according to previous narratives.
“I’ve offered a different account; research, including research disciplines and techniques we still use today, was developed not in service to political power and money-making, but in an effort to preserve knowledge from the baleful effects of political and financial bias,” Keller said.
Keller's study focused on German medical professor Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693), best known today as the founder of museology, the study of museums. Like many of his peers, however, Major’s innovations stretched across many disciplines, which he did by drawing on the latest science of his day to rethink the nature of thought itself.
University of Twente, Netherlands, Professor Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis reviewed Keller’s 2023 and 2024 books in the 2026 issue of the journal History of Humanities. He wrote that Keller’s book serves as a framework to reconsider what is usually seen as an “Age of [Isaac] Newton anew.”
“Curating the Enlightenment” looks at the methods that Major used — like indexing, cataloguing, citation and commentary — and how they have become essential to modern-day research, Dijksterhuis wrote.
Even in cash-strapped and war-torn environments, Keller said academics have treated knowledge and the process of conducting research with care. Unaware of the impact they’d have on future generations, she said she said they developed the tools that remain core to the academic process today, such as research articles, footnotes, bibliographies and academic museums.
“They did so as part of a period of experimentalism and out-of-the-box thinking and in opposition to how some forces, such as race-based slavery, distorted experimental science,” Keller said. “Such efforts offer powerful warnings and inspirations for our own times, when time-honored research infrastructures are due for a revision and the liberal arts are again in need of defense.”
— By Henry Houston, College of Arts and Sciences Communications