Professor Julia Tomasson is a historian of premodern science, technology, and mathematics. In both her research and teaching, Tomasson is interested in the surprising histories of concepts we take for granted—such as evidence, proof, and reasonableness—and how ideas and practices of knowledge have changed across times and cultures. Tomasson holds an A.B from the University of Chicago in History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine and a M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D.
in History from Columbia University in New York.

Tomasson is currently working on her first book project, Polygons and Polyphony: Arabic Mathematics after the Golden Age, which explores troves of previously dismissed Arabic mathematical manuscripts in the context of lived traditions of Islamic logic and local epistemic cultures. Rather than imposing Greek or modern ideals of logic and mathematics, Tomasson traces the creative practices of reading, constructing, and critiquing mathematical proofs across different “cultures of proof.” Polygons and Polyphony tells not only a global history of mathematics that takes the interplay of different concepts of rationality seriously but also offers a new account of one of the most contested transmission histories in the history of science—the evolution and transfer of knowledge from Greek Antiquity to the “Golden Age” of Islam to the European “Scientific Revolution.”

Professor Tomasson welcomes inquiries from undergraduate and graduate students interested, broadly, in learning more about the history of science, mathematics, and/or technology or in any of her temporal (1200-1800), geographic (Europe, all sides of the Mediterranean, and Western and Central Asia), or methodological foci (historical epistemology, global history, STS, post-colonial critiques of knowledge, manuscript studies, material and textual histories of ideas, critical historiography).