Introduction: Erasures in the history of science

Abstract

For more than three decades, historians have been attentive to the field’s Eurocentrism and to its tendency to marginalize histories from colonized, formerly colonized, or Global South regions. From Nancy Leys Stepan, Marcos Cueto, and Warwick Anderson in the 1990s to a rich roster of scholars today, historians of Latin American science have challenged longstanding assumptions in a range of themes, including core and periphery, the transfer of knowledge, and agency and innovation. The articles in this special section are informed by these scholarly genealogies. The essays began to take shape at a larger workshop hosted at Harvard in the spring of 2022. There, Gabriela Soto Laveaga issued a call to pivot away from triumphalist who-did-it-first narratives, and to turn instead to an epistemological critique of moments in which the erasure of Latin American science has been productive for the broader historiography of the history of science, medicine, and technology. At the workshop participants were urged to query what intellectual work is made possible by the marginalization of other narratives.