PhD History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), (Toronto)
David Pantalony (he/il) is Curator of Science and Medicine at Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation in Ottawa.
As a curator at Ingenium, I am involved in many activities that relate to the material culture of science—collecting and preserving objects, researching and facilitating research in our collections, teaching with objects and curating exhibitions. Ingenium curators also work extensively with smaller collections throughout Canada to help preserve and interpret these heritage assets at the regional level. In 2009, with support from the SSHRC Situating Science project, we developed the Reading Artifacts workshop as a hands-on method for diverse researchers and students to engage with our collections, and their own local collections. For many years, I have tested these approaches through collection-based seminars at the University of Ottawa.
The Science and Medicine curatorial position covers a wide array of disciplines—physics, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, metrology, chemistry, meteorology, time keeping, exploration and surveying. I connect these diverse subjects through a focus on the material culture of precision and scientific instruments in Canada.
Precision Instrument Culture in Canada—A project to develop a national inventory of precision makers, collections and artifacts.
The Things They Carried, Unveiling the Place of Objects in the Global Circulation of Knowledge—A pedagogical exhibit and database developed for the international conference, “Circulating Knowledge: 20 Years On,” King’s College, Halifax, August 2024
Fanny Gribenski, David Pantalony and Viktoria Tkaczyk (Eds) Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes, Oxford University Press, 2025.
“Relational objects: What we learn about scientific instruments in a museum context,” in Writing the History of Scientific Instruments: State of the Art and Future Perspectives, Nuncius, special issue, in press for 2025.
Prairie Physics: Scientists, Instruments and Makers at the University of Saskatchewan, 1948-1960. Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, June 2024, 28-33.
“What Remains: The Enduring Value of Museum Collections in the Digital Age.” HoST – Journal of History of Science and Technology, 2020, 14 (1) 130-152.
“The Presence, Provenance and Presentness of a Non-Artifact,” Museum & Society, November 2019, 17(3) 301-306.
Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Springer, 2009. (Winner of the Paul Bunge Prize in the History of Scientific Instruments).
