Celine Camps (2024)

Celine Camps is a doctoral candidate in the history of early modern science at Columbia University (New York). Her research lies at the intersection of the history of science and technology, art, and material culture, and focuses on early modern craft. She is especially interested in the practice of (German) metalworking.

Her dissertation focuses on securing screws, screw makers, and the screw-making industry in Renaissance Nuremberg and explores why, how, and to what eGect fifteenth- and sixteenth-century goldsmiths began to develop and use screws—instead of or in addition to other fastening technologies and techniques—to assemble their artifacts.

The 2024 NISS dissertation grant will help support the fieldwork necessary for this dissertation, which includes material-technical analysis and hands-on engagement with screw-based museum objects.

Celine earned a B.A. (cum laude) in Arts and Culture from Maastricht University, a Master’s degree (cum laude) in the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities from Utrecht University, and an M.A. and M.Phil. degree in History from Columbia University.

Before coming to Columbia, she worked at Sven Dupré’s research group Art and Knowledge in Premodern Europe at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in The Hague. From 2016 to 2019, she was a participant in Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University, as part of which she has helped transcribe, encode, and translate a sixteenth-century French technical-artisanal manuscript.

She is also a committee member of the Early Modern Metals Research Network (EMMRN).