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, Philosophy, and Technology; Pharmacology; Intercultural Connections between Mediterranean, Assyro-Babylonia, and India

Profile:

I have been at UC Davis since 2014. I hold a BA Honours from the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Classics, Contemporary Studies), an MA from Dalhousie University (Classics) and a PhD from Columbia University. 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, Plato’s Timaeus, ancient magico-medical fads, and the Hellenistic kingdoms.

My first book, Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Greek and Roman Medicine (currently in press at the University of Chicago Press) 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.

My second book project, Technologies of Nature, places ancient scientific theories within their technological contexts more broadly, illustrating how changing material realities shaped scientific assumptions in Greco-Roman antiquity. In it, I explore how even simple devices like mirrors, glass and wax tablets can create patterns of thinking, and I investigate them alongside the development of more sophisticated cognitive tools, like diagrams, experimental devices and astronomical mechanisms. The book examines these issues through the disciplines of ancient biology, botany, medicine, mechanics, optics, meteorology and astronomy.

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 (in preparation).

Articles/Chapters

“Manufacturing Motion in Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium.” In Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity, eds. T. Bur, M. Gerolemou, I. A. Ruffell, forthcoming 2025, 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

Mellon New Directions Fellowship 2023–2024

Hellman Fellowship, 2020–2021

UC Davis Faculty Development Award, 2020-2021            

External Faculty Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, 2017-2018            

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