Dr Kristen Lippincott is a London-based historian, specialising in art history, cultural history, the history of science and scientific instruments. She has spent most of her career working in and with museums, most notably as the Director of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum in London and as a Founding Director of The Exhibitions Team. She is currently Director of the Saxl Project.Her academic affiliations include the Warburg Institute and University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by a series of prestigious academic awards and fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J Paul Getty Trust and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. During the academic year 1987-88, she was a Fellow at the Harvard University’s Center for Renaissance Studies at the Vila I Tatti in Florence and in 2003-04, she was Visiting Professor there.She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and her books include: Astronomy, Dorling Kindersley/ Eyewitness Science series, London (etc.): Dorling Kindersley, 1994; The Story of Time [exhibition catalogue, London, the National Maritime Museum, 1 December 1999 - 28 September 2000], London: Merrell Holberton, 1999 (translated into French (Flammarion), Spanish (Grijablo), Dutch (Sluyters), Korean (Pun-run-soop Publishing) and Hungarian (Perfekt); A Guide to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London: National Maritime Museum, 2007; The Aratea ascribed to Germanicus. MS 735C Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales. Commentary to the Facsimile Edition and Latin Edition with English translation, Lucerne: Quaternio Verlag, 2019; and The Curious History of the Text and Illustrations of Hyginus’s De Astronomia, Cologne: Albireo Verlag, 2021. Most recently, she contributed to an edition, translation and iconographic examination of the British Library manuscript attributed to Georgius Zothorus Zaparus Fendulus, Sloane Ms 3983 , in Liber Astrologiae. Abū Ma'shar Treatise, Barcelona: M. Moleiro, 2023.Dr Elly Dekker is a Dutch astronomer and science historian, specialising in the history of astronomy. She studied theoretical physics at Utrecht University. In 1975, she obtained a PhD. in astronomy at Leiden University with the thesis Spiral structure and the dynamics of flat stellar systems supervised by Hendrik C. van de Hulst.From 1978-88 she was curator at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. After 1988 she worked as an independent scholar on the history of astronomical models and instruments. From 1993-1995 she was Sackler fellow of the Royal Museums Greenwich. She was awarded the Caird Medal for her work on the museum’s globe collection in 1998.Her books include The Leiden Sphere. An exceptional seventeenth-century planetarium (Leiden, 1987); with Peter van der Krogt, Globes from the Western World (Zwemmer, London, 1993); Globes at Greenwich. A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (Oxford, Greenwich, 1999); Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza: Catalogue of Orbs, Spheres and Globes (Florence, 2004); and Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013). Her papers comprise studies on the discovery of the southern celestial sky, on medieval astrolabes and quadrants, on Renaissance globes, and on the history of Renaissance celestial maps.
