Azadeh Achbari

received her PhD from the Faculty of Science, VU University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is currently revising her dissertation, Rulers of the Winds, How academics came to dominate the science of the weather, 1830–1870, for publication as a monograph. Her dissertation and a number of related publications focus on discipline formation and the history of meteorology and marine studies during the long nineteenth century.

Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis

studies the cultural history of early modern knowledge practices. His early research focused on the history of early modern optics, investigating the intersections between mathematics, physics and instruments in the seventeenth century. He has an ongoing specific interest in matters of light, exploring new perspectives on early modern optics from the arts, instruments, philosophy, and economy.

Alette Fleischer

holds a MA degree as Art Historian and obtained in 2010 a PhD degree in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Twente. Her dissertation was titled: Rooted in fertile soil: Seventeenth-century Dutch gardens and the hybrid history of material and knowledge production. Since then, as an independent scholar who earns a living as a self-employed museum guide, she has published several articles on the topic of gardening and the production and consumption of knowledge in the Dutch Republic.

Floor Haalboom

teaches history of (veterinary) medicine and environmental history at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam and Utrecht University. She is a member of the Utrecht University Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. As a post-doctoral historian, she writes about the modern history of environmental and health problems associated with modern livestock farming, including infectious diseases shared by humans and livestock. She is currently working on a global environmental history of livestock feed, started during her fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich in 2018–2019.

Marijn J. Hollestelle

works as a project leader for QANU, conducting activities in the field of external quality assurance in higher education and research. He has worked as a researcher at the Foundation for the History of Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he has done research on the history of polymer science. He published parts of this research in The plastics revolution: how the Netherlands became a global player in plastics (2017), together with H.W. Lintsen and H.N.M. Hölsgens, and in this present volume.

Dirk van Miert

is an associate professor of Early Modern Cultural History at Utrecht University and a member of the Descartes Centre Utrecht. He publishes studies on the history of early modern knowledge, in particular the Republic of Letters, the history of universities, and the history of scholarship.

Ilja Nieuwland

is a historian of science working for the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the cultural history of paleontology and paleontological museum collections. Recently, he published American Dinosaur Abroad. A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

Abel Streefland

received his PhD from Leiden University. He wrote a dissertation on Jaap Kistemaker and uranium enrichment in The Netherlands, 1945–1962. He currently works as a university historian at the Library of the Technical University in Delft. His research focusses on the post-war development of science and technology in The Netherlands.

Andreas Weber

is an assistant professor in the department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Most of his research examines the history of natural history and chemistry in the context of the former Dutch empire in insular Southeast Asia. He is also involved in a digital humanities project, “Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives,” directed toward developing search capability for illustrated archival material.

Martin P.M. Weiss

is a historian of science at the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in Bremerhaven and an associate lecturer at the University of

Brunswick. He studied physics and history of science in Aachen and Utrecht and received his PhD from Leiden University in 2013.

Gerhard Wiesenfeldt

is a historian of science and a lecturer in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has worked extensively on the history of early modern natural philosophy, with a focus on universities, especially the University of Leiden. His current research studies the role of practitioners in the longue durée of academic philosophy.

Huib J. Zuidervaart

is a retired senior researcher from the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, an institution of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences – KNAW. He was the Editor-in-chief of Studium, the Belgian-Dutch journal for the History of Science, Medicine and Universities (2008–2017). Currently, with a colleague, he is finishing the last two volumes of the correspondence of the microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), a project started in 1939.