Author: Aileen Fyfe

Dr Aileen Fyfe‘s book Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 has won the Edelstein Prize, an award given by the Society for the History of Technology. The prize was awarded at the Society’s annual meeting in Portland, Maine, where the book was honoured with a roundtable discussion. Panelists praised Steam-Powered Knowledge for […]

I have made available the text and statistics of my investigation into the British history of science community. Over a hundred historians of science responded to my online survey in 2011, asking about their sense of academic identity as historians of science. I wrote two papers based on their responses. One has been revised and […]

My colleague, Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith, and I thought that dressing up in Georgian costume might be a way to engage visitors with historic artefacts relating to the voyages of discovery to the South Seas, in the late eighteenth century. Our event, which was part of Fife Science Week 2013, and hosted at MUSA (Museum of […]

It’s gratifying to know that there are students and seminar groups reading my book. I recently received some questions from a class in North America, and took the opportunity to reflect on some of the structural and organisational decisions involved in the creation of _Steam-Powered Knowledge_, and the contrast between academic and trade books. The […]

I just discovered that I’m sharing this year’s Colby Prize, awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, for my book Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 (Chicago, 2012). The Colby Prize, established in 2006, is awarded to the book that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper or […]

Cross-Posted from the St Andrews School of History blog. Dr Aileen Fyfe has been awarded a £790,000 research grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council for a four-year project telling the story of the world’s oldest surviving scientific journal. The Philosophical Transactions has been published by the Royal Society in London since 1665, and […]

[Cross-posted from the standrewsschoolofhistory blog, with minor revisions] Why would a professor of Natural History in 1920s St Andrews own a typewriter? When I originally agreed to give a lunchtime talk at MUSA, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was a problematic question. It is easy for us to see typewriters as the precursors […]

We’re all supposed to be engaging in outreach, and extending our educational activities beyond the campus, but for me (and, I suspect, for most historians) this often takes the form of a public lecture. Public lectures are a familiar format, and easy for us to do – but given what we know about effective classroom […]