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I work on science for children in nineteenth-century Britain. I am currently preparing a book proposal based on my PhD research into scientific object lessons from 1830-1870, provisionally entitled Learning Things. My new research project analyses ‘familiar science’ from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, exploring the literary style of the familiar introduction, the family context for science, and how familiarity was deployed to explain, instruct, and entertain. Topics of ongoing interest include the histories of everyday artefacts and activities, genre and analogy, fairy-tales and board games, puns and toys, and collecting science songs. I have published on pebbles, cups of tea, and ‘Construments’ toy sets. I recently co-curated an exhibition at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science on ‘Darwin’s Microscope’, and am now writing ‘Explore’ webpages on scientific toys from the Whipple collections. In 2008 I consulted for the British Council on the children’s content of their ‘Darwin Now’ exhibition. Since 2005 I have helped organise the Cambridge Science and Literature Reading Group, now held at Homerton, for the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and I run its blog. I have recently begun work as the editor of Viewpoint, the newsletter of the British Society for the History of Science, and since 2006 have been part of their Outreach and Education Committee. Work with this committee has included developing projects on Georgian astronomy, Amazonian travels, and object autobiography, judging the Dingle Prize 2009, and performing in role-play dramas about seventeenth-century plague, body-snatching in Liverpool, and the Victorian séance (with the BSHS Strolling Players). I am on the executive committee of the British Society for Literature and Science, whose 2011 conference will be hosted by Homerton from 8-10 April, and on the History of Science section of the British Science Association. |
