Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) and His Impact on the History of Microscopy

International Conference

Venue: London, UK
Start: Sep 14, 2023 09:00 AM (London UTC+01:00)
End: Sep 15, 2023 05:00 PM
Speaker: Conference
Location: The Royal Society 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, St. James's, London SW1Y 5AG, UK / Public event with ticket sales – please see website of the Royal Society here below
Contact: katja.hackstein@biblhertz.it

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) and His Impact on the History of Microscopy

Three hundred years ago the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek died. He had been corresponding with the Royal Society for fifty years. Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in the Netherlands in 1632, developed himself into one of the most prolific early microscopists. He made his own lenses and small hand-held microscopes which were more versatile than most other devices at the time. With these instruments and his outstanding preparation and observation techniques, he was the first to see and describe red blood cells, bacteria and many other things.

In this conference we will take a close look at Leeuwenhoek’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century microscopic practices as well as the development of the field of microscopy from his death to the twenty-first century. We will show how Leeuwenhoek was working as part of a large European network of scientists exploring the natural world with microscopes.The papers in this conference will make clear that microscopic practices and the way in which scientists communicated their findings to each other started in Leeuwenhoek’s time and are still used today.

SPEAKERS: Sietske Fransen (BHMPI Rome, IT); Sachiko Kusukawa (University of Cambridge, UK); Eric Jorink (Leiden University & Huygens Institute, NL); Christoffer Basse Eriksen (Humboldt-Universität Berlin, DE); Fabrizio Baldassarri (Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at Ca’ Foscari Venice, IT und Indiana University Bloomington, USA); Pamela MacKenzie(SSHRC visiting Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Cambridge, UK); Ellen Pater (Leiden University & Huygens Institute, NL); Tiemen Cocquyt (Rijksmuseum Boerhaave Leiden, NL); Christoph Lüthy (Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL); Lesley Robertson (Delft University of Technology, NL); Larissa van Vianen (University of Amsterdam, NL); John Hutchison (Royal Microscopic Society, UK); Peter Heering (Europa-Universität Flensburg, DE); Marvin Bolt (Technische Universität Berlin, DE); Michael Korey (Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Dresden, DE); Douglas Anderson and Huib Zuidervaart (Editors of the Collected Letters, NL); Wim van Egmond Visual Artist, NL)

A Public event with ticket sales – please see website of the Royal Society:
https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2023/09/leeuwenhoek-conference/

Scientific Organization: Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Tiemen Cocquyt, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Eric Jorink, Leiden University/Huygens Instituut