Science, Expertise, and Society: ND HPS Annual Conference (Spring 2026)

Conference dates: March 26th – 28th.

Abstracts are due January 31st, 2026. Submit here.

Registration is free, but required. Register here.

For additional questions, get in touch at ndhpsconference@nd.edu.

It was fortunate for Charles de Bois-Valé, lawyer and natural philosopher, that he had an
ingenious legal team. In May of 1780, he had affixed a lightning rod to his house to protect his
community, the small French town of Saint-Omer, from thunderbolts. Unimpressed by the
amateur physicien, Vissery’s neighbors sued him on the grounds that the rod might be dangerous. Vissery’s lawyer argued that judges could not force Viessery to take down his lightning rod
unless the proper experts, accredited physiciens, deemed it unsafe, and he hired legal whiz kid
Maximilien Robespierre to make the oral argument. Robespierre, however, reversed his boss’s
position on the necessity of experts. Drawing on Rousseau, Robespierre argued that judges were
perfectly capable of determining the safety of the lightning rod without knowledge of electrical
phenomena; like all human beings, they possessed an innate ability to understand brute facts
about nature. A decade later, as deputy of the National Convention, Robespierre imposed his
distrust of expertise upon the new Republic: “All academies and literary societies established or
endowed by the nation are eliminated.”¹

The story of Vissery in eighteenth-century France points to perennial and global questions about
the phenomenon of “scientific expertise.” In a historical register, how have sciences, expertise,
and the state been co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing? How have (and how do) practices of
quantification and categorization contribute to colonial expansion and reification of racial
hierarchies? Philosophically, how can we assess “good judgment” within scientific practices?
Can such assessments be articulated and generalized to domains “outside the lab,” or are they inevitably “tacit” and context-specific? From a theological perspective, what are the tensions and synergies between scientific and religious epistemologies and authorities?

These questions invite historical, local, and discipline-specific answers to these questions. We are seeking to bring together a variety of perspectives on the topic of scientific expertise in society in the hopes of bringing mutual illumination and clarity—perhaps even beyond the walls of the academy.

The conference will feature keynote presentations from Dr. Mark Harris (Theology, University of Oxford), Dr. Mitra Sharafi (Law, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Dr. Katharina Nieswandt (Philosophy, Concordia University), and Dr. Andrew Jewett (History, Johns Hopkins University).

This conference is made possible by the generous support of the following institutions at the University of Notre Dame:
The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values
The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good
The Department of Philosophy
The Department of History