Charles Coulston Gillispie (August 6, 1918 – October 6, 2015) was an American historian of science. He was the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, and was credited with building Princeton's history of science program into a leading center for the field. He was succeeded by Arno J. Mayer.

Life

The son of Raymond Livingston Gillispie and Virginia Coulston, Gillispie grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Wesleyan University, graduating in 1940 with a major in chemistry and also a distinguished thesis in history. He then spent one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying chemical engineering before transferring to Harvard to pursue history in 1941. He was then drafted into the US Army for World War II and served in the 94th Chemical Mortar Battalion after attending officer training school. He returned to Harvard in 1946 and gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1949 with a thesis supervised by British historian David Owen that became his first published book, Genesis and Geology, in 1951. Gillispie joined the Department of History at Princeton University after being recommended for an instructorship there in British history in 1947 by his advisor Owen. He was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. He taught his first undergraduate class in the history of science from 1956 to 1958, developing a curriculum that formed the basis for his book The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton University Press, 1960), a seminal general introduction to the history of science that Gillispie dedicated to the students of his classes. He established the Princeton Program in History of Science in the 1960s, for instance hiring Thomas Kuhn. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. He was president of the History of Science Society in 1965–66. He was awarded his second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970. In 1972, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He headed the editorial board of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography from 1970 to 1980, for which he received the Dartmouth Medal in 1981. In 1980 Gillispie published Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton University Press, 1980), which won the Pfizer Award in 1981. He was awarded the lifetime achievement George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society in 1984 and the Balzan Prize in 1997 for "the extraordinary contribution he has made to the history and philosophy of science by his intellectually vigorous, precise works, as well as his editing of a great reference work". He died on October 6, 2015, at the age of 97.

Works