Tawrin Baker

Biography

Tawrin Baker received his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Dibner Long-Term Fellow in History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Research Library, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersection of anatomy and medicine, natural philosophy, and mathematics in the early modern period. Projects include a monograph, currently titled Chiasmata: Visual Theory in the Intertwined Histories of Anatomy, Natural Philosophy, and Optics, 1500–1650, as well with a complementary project examining the (related, but independent) history of diagrams and pictures of the eye during roughly the same time period. He is also in the early stages of a project investigating shifts in the methods in comparative anatomy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the relevance of this shift for debates concerning human vs. animal speech.