Colin Webster

Education and Degree(s):

• PhD Classics, Columbia University
• MPhil, MA Classics, Columbia University
• MA Classics, Dalhousie University
• BA hons. Classics and Contemporary Studies, University of King's College, Halifax

About

Research Interest(s):

• Ancient Science, Medicine, Technology, and Philosophy; Optics; Pharmacology; Intercultural Connections between Mediterranean, Assyro-Babylonia, the Black Sea, Egypt, and India

Profile:

My research focuses on science, technology and medicine in Greco-Roman antiquity, and I have taught courses on these subjects, as well as history of time in antiquity, Greek tragedy, Plato, Aristotle, ancient magico-medical fads, enslavement and technology, Greco-Indian interactions, and the Hellenistic kingdoms.

My first book, Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Greek and Roman Medicine (Winner of the 2024 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit) tracks when ancient medical and biological theorists first argued that the body was constructed of function serving parts called organs (tools/organa in ancient Greek). It then demonstrates what this idea had to do with actual material technologies available in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, including the clepsydra, the catapult, and irrigation pipes. Moreover, it illustrates how, as new tools were invented, theories of the body changed with them. Technologies were crucial to ancient theories of corporeality on a structural, analogical, and practical level.

As an expansion of this project, my second book, Technologies of Nature (currently under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press), will adopt a similar approach to science more broadly in the ancient world, and deals with the material practices of astronomy, optics, meteorology, mechanics, biology, and medicine. Examples of this type of approach can be found in my articles, “Euclid’s Optics and Geometrical Astronomy” (Apeiron, 2014), and “Ptolemy’sOptics, Double-Vision, and the Technological Afterimage” (Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2022), as well as my entry on “Optics and Vision” in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Science and Medicine (2018).

Podcasts and Blog Posts

Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine w/Dr. Colin Webster (Chasing Leviathan), Mar.10, 2024.

"Violence and Health in Imperial Rome," The Rootcutter - Blog for the Society for Ancient Medicine, Sept. 9, 2024.

Selected Publications:

Books

Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023). 

Technologies of Nature in Classical Antiquity (under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press).

Articles/Chapters

“Medical Tools,” Cambridge History of Medicine, Volume One: Ancient Medicine, c. 3000 BCE–650CE, eds. R. Flemming and L. Totelin, (in preparation).

“Introduction: Slavery and Technology,” co-authored with Kassandra Miller, BICS (proposal under review).

“Osteology and Early Greek Dissection Practices,” Every Bones Has a Story, eds. M. Gerolemou and C. Scott, New York: Cambridge University Press (under review).

“Humours,” Oxford Classical Dictionary. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, under final review).

“Manufacturing Movement in Aristotle’s On the Motion of Animals.” In Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity, eds. T. Bur, M. Gerolemou, I. A. Ruffell, 2024, Oxford University Press, pp. 159–183.

 “Hippocrates, Diseases 4 and the Technological Body.” In Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity, ed. George Kazantzidis and Maria Gerolemou (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 155–178.

“Ptolemy’s Optics, Double-Vision, and the Technological Afterimage,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 94 (2022): 191-200. 

“Optics and Vision.” In Oxford Handbook of Ancient Science and Medicine, eds. Paul Keyser and John Scarborough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 483–518.

 “The Soundscape of Ancient Greek Healing.” In Sound and the Ancient Senses, eds. Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter. (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 109–129.

“Heuristic Medicine: The Methodists and Metalepsis,” Isis 106.3 (November 2015): 669-676.

“Voice Pathologies and the Hippocratic Triangle.” In Homo Patiens: Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World. Proceedings of a conference at the Institut für Klassische Philologie, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, (eds.) C. Thumiger and G. Petridou. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 166-199.

“Euclid’s Optics and Geometrical Astronomy.” Apeiron 47.4 (September 2014): 526–551.

Awards and Fellowships

Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit 2024

Mellon New Directions Fellowship 2023–2024

Hellman Fellowship, 2020–2021

UC Davis Faculty Development Award, 2020-2021            

Stanford Humanities Center, External Faculty Fellowship 2017-2018            

UC Davis Dean’s Academic Enrichment Award, 2016-2017