Associate Professor
Dr. Neswald is a historian of science and technology. She teaches introductory courses on science from Ancient Greece to the atom bomb and on technology since the Industrial Revolution as well as advanced courses on Science, Technology and Gender and the Material Culture of Science and Technology.
Before coming to Brock she taught at the University of Aberdeen in Scotlandand worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland at Galway. She received her doctoral degree from the HumboldtUniversity in Berlin.
She is the author of two books: Medien-Theologie. Das Werk Vilém Flussers(Böhlau Verlag, 1998) and Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz. Zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Entropie, 1850-1915 (Rombach, 2006) and numerous essays on thermodynamics, the history of nutrition physiology and the history of popular science in nineteenth-century Ireland.
Dr. Neswald’s research focuses on the history of thermodynamics and nutrition physiology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current project investigates the interplay of statistics and thermodynamics in the formulation of modern nutrition theories and practices and their effect on perceptions of the working body. She is currently completing a project begun at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on the international laboratory travels of the American nutrition physiologist Francis Gano Benedict and the development of an international community in metabolism research.
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 8. Ed. with Michael Barton, Piers Hale, Nathan Kapoor, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
Setting Nutritional Standards. Theory, Policies, Practices. With David F. Smith and Ulrike Thoms (eds), Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press/Boydell and Brewer 2017.
Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz. Eine Faszinationsgeschichte der Entropie 1850-1915, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach 2006.
Medien-Theologie. Das Werk Vilém Flussers, Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau 1998.
“Things that don’t talk much and things that feel: Developing a material culture methodology for ‘black box’ medical devices,” in Nuncius 35 (2020), 632-659.
“Standards and Statistics. Dietary norms between the lab and the field,” in Elizabeth Neswald, David F. Smith and Ulrike Thoms (eds), Setting Nutritional Standards. Theory, Policies and Practices, 1890-1950, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2017, 29-51
“Food Fights: Human Experimentation in Nineteenth-Century Nutritional Physiology,” in Erika Dyke and Larry Stewart (eds), The Uses of Humans in Experiments, Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016, 170-192.
“Measuring Metabolism”, in Oliver Schlaudt and Lara Huber (eds), Standardization in Measurement. Philosophical and Sociological Issues, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015, 161-172
“Saving the World in an Age of Entropy. John Tyndall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” in Bernard Lightman and Michael Reidy (eds), The Age of Scientific Naturalism. John Tyndall and his Contemporaries, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014. 15-31.
“Strategies of International Community-Building in Early 20th-century Metabolism Research: The Foreign Laboratory Visits of Francis Gano Benedict,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43 (2013), 1-40.
“Kapitalistische Kalorien. Energie und Ernährungsökonomien um die Jahrhundert-wende”, in Barbara Gronau (ed.), Szenarien der Energie. Zur Ästhetik und Wissenschaft des Immateriellen, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2012, 87-109.
“Eigenwillige Objekte und widerspenstige Dinge. Das Experimentieren mit Lebendigem in der Ernährungsphysiologie”, in Affektive Dinge. Objektberührungen in Wissenschaft und Kunst, Natascha Adamowsky, Robert Felfe, Marco Formisano, Georg Toepfer and Kirsten Wagner (eds.), Göttingen: Wallstein 2011, 51-79.
“Reading Instruments. Objects, Texts and Museums.” In collaboration with Katherine Anderson, Melanie Frappier and Henry Trim, Science & Education(online 25 September 2011; print forthcoming).
“Asserting Medical Identities in mid-nineteenth-century provincial Ireland: The Case of the Water-Cure in Cork”, in Juliana Adelman and Eadaoin Agnew (eds.), Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2011, 32-47.
“‘The Benefits of a Mechanics’ Institute and the Blessing of Temperance.’ Science and Temperance in 1840s Ireland,” in Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 22 (2008), 209-227.