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I work on science for children in nineteenth-century Britain, and I am currently preparing a book manuscript on Victorian fairy-tales of science. In general, my research 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, board games and fairy-tales, puns and toys, and collecting science songs. I am the editor of Viewpoint, the magazine 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 2011, and performing in role-play dramas about seventeenth-century plague, body-snatching in Liverpool, and the Victorian séance (with the BSHS Strolling Players). I have contributed articles to the BSHS Travel Guide. I am also on the History of Science section of the British Science Association. |
