Summary
Sean O’Neil is a historian of science whose research merges the history of science with the history of information to explore how interest in what would now be called “information visualization” emerged in medieval and early modern Europe. His book project, The Art of Signs: Symbolic Notation and Visual Thinking in Early Modern Europe, cuts across contemporary disciplinary boundaries to explain why early modern practitioners working in fields as various as chemistry, music, mathematics and dance converged on the belief that developing new forms of symbolic notation would solve outstanding epistemic problems. Research for this project has been funded in part by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
At the University of Nevada, Reno, Sean O’Neil teaches in and serves as Director of Core Humanities, a general-education undergraduate program whose interdisciplinary courses constitute an essential component of the University’s core curriculum. Firm in his conviction that reading old books can change lives, he enlists students in his Core Humanities courses to engage premodern texts precisely because their insights and their provocations speak so directly to many of the “big questions” that underlie students’ experience of the world today. Sean O’Neil received the University of Nevada, Reno’s Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award in 2022.
Research interests
- History of science
- Intellectual history
- History of education
- Early modern Europe
- Information visualization
Publications
- “Early Modern Europe’s Other Real Characters.” Language & History 67, no. 2 (August, 2024): 125–152.
- “Good Names but Better Symbols: The Establishment of Chemical Notation as a Nomenclatural Corrective at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.” Ambix 68, no. 4 (November, 2021): 331–64.
- “Playing up Spelling in an Age of Enlightenment,” The Center & Clark Newsletter 65, (Spring, 2017): 5–7.
Education
- Ph.D., History, Columbia University, 2019
- M.A., Folklore, University of California, Berkeley, 2009
- B.S., Linguistics, and B.A., Literature, Truman State University, 2004
Professional certifications
- Certificate in Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, 2019