Join STUDIO.nano for the next Resonances Lecture!
Paola Bertucci
Professor, Department of History and the History of Science and Medicine Program, Yale University
Date: October 26, 2026
Time: 4:30 PM — 6:00 PM ET
Location: Building 12, Room 0168
Following the talk, Professor Bertucci will be joined in conversation with Professor Craig Carter, Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.
ABSTRACT
Why do stories about technological inventions survive even when historical evidence proves them wrong? This talk explores the persistence of fabricated pasts through the remarkable case of Flavio Gioia, the alleged medieval inventor of the navigational compass. Created by a sixteenth-century translation mistake, Gioia never existed, yet he lived a remarkably long life on the printed page and beyond. For centuries, he figured in histories of technology and accounts of the making of the modern world. Following Gioia across texts, images, and monuments, the talk examines what the persistence of technological myths reveals about the role of inventions in narratives of modernity.
BIOGRAPHY
Paola Bertucci is a professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. Her work has focused broadly on science, technology, and medicine in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and more recently on fabricates realities and technologies of information and disinformation before the digital age.
She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Louis Gottschalk from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), winner of 2025 Paul Bunge prize for best book on the history of scientific instruments.
Professor Bertucci is eager to bring innovative scholarly perspectives to broader audiences through museum exhibitions. She serves as the Curator-in-charge of the History of Science and Technology Division of the Yale Peabody Museum, where she co-curated the first permanent gallery at Yale dedicated to the History of Science and Technology.
About the Resonances Lectures
The Resonances Lectures navigate the intersection of contemporary art, pure and applied sciences, and everyday life. Inaugurated in the Spring of 2025 by STUDIO.nano, this lecture and panel series seeks to gather artists, designers, scientists, engineers, and historians who examined critically how scientific endeavors shape artistic production and vice versa. Their insights expose the historical context on how art and science are made and distributed in society, and offer hints at the possible futures of such productions.
An exploration of the history and present meaning of curiosity, attention, and the urge to know, Resonances shuttles engagingly between rigor and intuition, inviting both the members of MIT community and the general public audience to further engage with and learn from, the past and future of interdisciplinary ideas across vastly different domains and scales.