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 […]
AHRC award for the history of the Philosophical Transactions (1665-2015)
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 […]
The D’Arcy Thompson Typewriter
[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 […]
Recreating Victorian popular science
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 […]