About

Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and serves as the Director of the Center for Science and Society. Her research investigates craft and practice as a form of knowledge, with a focus on early modern Europe. She is the founding director of the Making and Knowing Project, which explores the history of practical knowledge, embodied practice, and material culture through hands-on research and digital resources. Smith has authored several books, including 'The Business of Alchemy,' 'The Body of the Artisan,' and 'From Lived Experience to the Written Word,' which examine the intersections of craft, science, and knowledge in historical contexts. Her work emphasizes reconstructing practical knowledge and understanding socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry over long-term histories. She has led innovative projects such as the creation of open access research and teaching resources, digital editions, and tools like EditionCrafter to support scholarship and education in the history of science and craft.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Communication
• Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Geometry
• Computer graphics (images)
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• 25.10.07 Cooper, Tracy, ed. Women Artists and Artisans in Venice and the Veneto, 1400-1750: Uncovering the Female Presence.

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2025-10-07

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• Techne

  Techne. · 2024-04-18

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• Preface to the Paperback Edition

  2024-10-04

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• Counterfeiting Materials, Imitating Nature

  2023-03-01 · 2 citations

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  The remarkable ceramic vessels crafted by Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) and the cast-from-life tableware of Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/08-1585) testify to a fascination with nature's creations and its generative processes among sixteenth-century artists (figs.1.1, 1.2).Filled with animals, shells, and plants molded from actual specimens, these objects mimicked the diversity of nature.From Palissy's writings it is clear that such objects were meant not just as a mimesis of the form of natural things, however, but also as an assertion of his ability, through imitation, to gain knowledge of nature.1In 'The art of the earth' , a section of his Discours admirables (1580), Palissy (1957, 188-203) asserts that knowledge of nature can only come by means of 'art' , a direct engagement with the materials of nature involving great bodily labor and suffering.Because Figure 1.1 Bernard Palissy, dish with rustic 'figulines' , second half of the sixteenth century.Lead-glazed clay, 76.1 cm × 45.

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• :<i>Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History</i>

  West 86th · 2023-09-01

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• Minerva Meets Vulcan: Scientific and Technological Literature – 1450–1750

  Annals of Science · 2022-08-21 · 1 citations

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• Epistemology, Artisanal

  2022-01-01

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• From Lived Experience to the Written Word

  2021 · 48 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
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• Thinking through Molds: Metal Flow and Visualizing the Unseen

  West 86th · 2021 · 1 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Art
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• Making things

  2021-01-18 · 1 citations

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  Since at least the seventeenth century, when Descartes proclaimed that being able to make a machine was tantamount to true knowledge of the machine, understanding the process by which objects are made has come to be another approach both to things and to knowledge. Indeed, historians and museum curators are often confronted with objects, and they are increasingly of the opinion that no longer is it enough to understand how an object participated in commercial networks or the role it played in patronage relationships; an appreciation of the meaning, function, and operation of a historical object can also be gained by a knowledge of how it is made. The contrast between words and things and writing and doing seemed particularly acute to some early modern thinkers. Historian of science Peter Heering recently reconstructed an eighteenth- century solar microscope and found that historians could understand the significance of solar microscopes in the Enlightenment only by seeing them in action.

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Recent grants

• Standard Grant: The Role of Craft Skill in Scientific Practice

  NSF · $314k · 2017–2025

• The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Scientific Experimentation

  NSF · $436k · 2014–2018

• Workshop: Translation and Encoding for the Making and Knowing Project

  NSF · $34k · 2017–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Le Magasin

  Emmanuel College - Massachusetts

  49 shared

• Desmazières Erik

  École Nationale des Chartes

  49 shared

• Nathan Schlanger

  École Nationale des Chartes

  49 shared

• Robert Capia

  Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio

  49 shared

• Matthias Bruhn

  Medizinische Hochschule Hannover

  49 shared

• Peter G. Miller

  École Nationale des Chartes

  49 shared

• Tianna Helena Uchacz

  Texas A&M University

  7 shared

• Bethany Nowviskie

  James Madison University

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  The Johns Hopkins University

  1991

• Other

  University of Wollongong, New South Wales

Awards & honors

• Honorable Mention, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for the bes…
• Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship, Center for Advanced…
• George L. Mosse Prize for the most distinguished book on the…
• The Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize for outstanding teaching…
• Herzog August Bibliothek and the Hans and Helga Eckensberger…