Dr. James McClellan III Faculty Papers

Born in Gatesville, Texas on the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation, James E. McClellan III (1946…) joined Stevens Institute of Technology in 1977 as an assistant professor in the Humanities Department. He was promoted to associate professor in 1982, tenured (finally) in 1989, and appointed full professor in 1992. He was named professor emeritus in 2016 upon his retirement from the Institute.

Over the course of his thirty-nine years at Stevens McClellan served the Institute in various capacities. He joined the Stevens chapter of the American Association of University Professors (the AAUP) and served on its negotiating committee before that unit was disbanded at Stevens in 1980. In addition to minor assignments, McClellan was elected to the Faculty Council in 1990-1992, when he was instrumental in normalizing the tenure system at Stevens, and again in 2009-2011, when he served with colleagues at the time of the New Jersey Attorney General’s suit against Stevens and the fall of President Raveché. That same Faculty Council launched and then gave way to the Faculty Senate at Stevens. McClellan likewise served nine years as an elected or appointed member of the faculty committee on promotions and tenure, three times as chair.

His role as chair of the ad-hoc Institute task force on reorganization in 1996 proved pivotal in his service record at Stevens. Based on the findings of that committee, Stevens constituted itself into three schools: Engineering, Sciences & Arts, and Technology Management. The then provost, Arthur Shapiro, in 1996 appointed McClellan as interim dean of the School of Applied Sciences and Liberal Arts (SASLA), a position he held for the academic year 1996-1997; McClellan returned as interim or acting dean on two other occasions, and with permanent deans in place (first Patrick Flanagan, then Erich E. Kunhardt) McClellan continued as associate dean until 2003 in SASLA and the Imperatore School of Sciences and Arts (ISSA) that succeeded it. When Stevens undertook a further reorganization in 2007, McClellan was named the founding dean of the College of Arts and Letters, a position he happily relinquished in 2009. Stevens honored McClellan with the degree of M. Eng. (honoris causa) in 1998.

McClellan differentiated the role of a professor from that of a teacher, and he prided himself on being a professor. He was a successful and much appreciated presence in the classroom, where he lectured in an academic gown. His bread and butter course was HHS 130: History of Science and Technology. He taught upper-level history of science courses on Darwin, on Galileo, on Newton, and on the Scientific Revolution more generally. He initiated instruction at Stevens on the social history of science and on technology studies. At other points he taught classes on ancient science, the French Revolution, and the ‘60s. Reflecting his mature interests, towards the end of his teaching career he offered seminars on historiography and world history. He always received high marks from students. In 1995 he was honored with the Henry Morton Distinguished Teaching Professor award from the Institute, and he twice won the outstanding teacher award from the Stevens Alumni Association (1997, 2003), a significant recognition for someone teaching the humanities at Stevens to a handful of students.

An historian of science, McClellan was likewise a productive scholar and researcher who garnered an international reputation. He trained at Columbia (B.A in French, 1968 [sic]) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1975, history of science), where he studied with such luminaries as Charles Gillispie, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Robert Darnton. His research centered largely on French science in the Old Regime, and his work was based chiefly on his immersion in European and American archives. He authored, co-authored, edited, or translated something like ten books and fifty scholarly and popular articles in English and in French. In addition to substantial service as an anonymous scholarly referee, McClellan wrote nearly one hundred reviews and gave seventy-five public lectures in the course of his career. He published widely in leading

journals and with leading presses on early modern and Old Regime scientific institutions, the scientific press, and norms in science. He likewise wrote and lectured on applied science, scientific creationism, historiography, epistemology, and postmodernism and science. Later work concerned the overlapping disciplines of history and numismatics. McClellan was an early contributor to the field of Science & Empire studies, notably with his pathbreaking 1992 book on science in the French colony of Saint Domingue, today’s Haiti (reprinted in 2010). In 2011 he published with a younger French colleague the monumental study, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. He twice shared the Jess H. Davis Memorial Research Award from Stevens (1983, 1999). His monograph on the publications committee of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences won John Frederick Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. The textbook he co-authored with his Stevens colleague, Harold Dorn, Science & Technology in World History, went through three editions (1999, 2006, 2015), was translated into several languages, and won the book of the year award from the World History Association in 2000.

McClellan was elected by his peers internationally to fellowship status in the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, first as a membre correspondant in 2002, and then as a voting membre effectif in 2008. He was twice elected (1995, 2006) to teach at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He obtained four sabbatical leaves from Stevens, and for 1999-2000 he secured a highly competitive sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. At an earlier phase in his career McClellan earned a scholarship from the French government to study and do research in France. McClellan was a lifetime sustaining member of the History of Science Society USA and a charter member of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).

Before coming to Stevens, in 1976-1977 McClellan held the job of assistant manuscripts librarian at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. There he learned the archivist trade. As a result, in his years since at Stevens he systematically collected and ultimately curated his own papers. Now on deposit at Williams Library, they reflect his career trajectory as a student radical, graduate student, faculty member, professor, scholar, and administrator at Stevens Institute of Technology.