Armel Cornu is a social historian of science specializing in the history of chemistry and medicine in the 18th century. As a Beckman postdoctoral fellow, she will research the prevalence of sensory knowledge within chemistry, and investigate the mechanisms of its transmission among chemists. This project will bring further light to the formation of chemistry as an independent field, and create connections between two active research areas: the history of early modern chemistry and the sensory studies of the Enlightenment.
Armel’s work has appeared in Circumscribere and L’Actualité chimique. She also worked as an editor on a forthcoming anthology concerning public history. She earned her PhD in 2022 at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Her doctoral dissertation centered on the market, regulation, and science of mineral water during the French Enlightenment.