Staff profile

Contact

Office Location: Durham Univeresity Department of Philosophy, 50-51 Old Elvet, DH1 3HN, second floor, Room 203.

Office Hours: By appointment. Michaelmas (Tuesday: 11:00-14:00), Epiphany (Monday: 11:00-14:00). Contact: m.d.eddy@durham.ac.uk

Social Media: X (Twitter) Bluesky  Academia

Areas of Expertise

Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Media Studies, Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities, Gender Studies, The Enlightenment (and its Afterlives)

Profile

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe. Early in my career I worked at Princeton University, MIT, Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I've since held professorial appointments at Durham University, Caltech and Uppsala University. I currently am Durham University’s Chair and Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science and the Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In 2024-2025 I will be a visiting professor and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University.

Research

Most of my research addresses the cultural history of science in modern Britain and its former empire. I am especially interested in how different social groups used science and its attendant media technologies to make competing knowledge claims about the nature and the body. I have authored two books on this subject titled Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: 2023) and The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry, and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750-1800 (Routledge: 2008/2016).

I've edited five volumes about the cultural history of science, medicine and philosophy in Europe and its former empires. Their titles are A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury: 2022), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Chicago: 2014), Prehistoric Minds: Human Origins as a Cultural Artefact, 1780-2010 (Royal Society: 2011), William Paley's Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (Oxford: 2006), and Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (Routledge: 2005/2017). 

Over the years I have published around forty articles in the journals such as Journal of British Studies, British Journal for the History of Science, Book History, Intellectual History Review, History of Education, Literature and Theology, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London and elsewhere.  Open access (free) copies of my work are availible at Academia and Durham Research Online (DRO).

Current Projects

In addition to pursuing my longstanding interests in the ways people in the past used media technologies to create scientific knowledge, I am currently researching a book tentatively titled Information against Empire: Race, Democracy and Colonial Statistics. It addresses how early 19th-century Scottish-trained black physicians used their knowledge of natural history and medical science to challenge racial assumptions embedded in the statistics created by imperial institutions. You can learn more about one of these physicians, Dr James McCune Smith of New York City, by reading my open access essay about him in The Conversation titled ‘New Discovery Reveals How First African American Doctor Fought for Women’s Rights in Glasgow’.

At the moment I am coordinating four international projects. The first is an AHRC-funded collaborative project with Keith Moore of the Royal Society of London.  Titled Astronomical Notebooks and the Material Culture of Predigital Communication Systems, it funds a PhD student and investigates the paper technologies used by the astronomer Caroline Herschel during the late Georgian era.  The second project, Scientific Instructions and Colonialism, is a collaboration with Linda Burnett Anderson and Maria Florutau, both based at Uppsala University, Sweden.  It investigates how seemingly simple lists of instructions issued by colonial institutions during the 18th and 19th centuries shaped the values of scientists as they collected data at home and across the globe.  

The third project, The Enlightened Diarist, is a collaboration with Jane Rendall and Rachel Feldberg, both based at York University's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.  It focuses on the daily interactions between science, the arts and sociability in the city of York as experienced by the provincial diarist Jane Ewbank. The fourth project, Science and Protestantism in Eastern Europe, is a collaboration with Ábrahám Kovács, based at János Selye University, Slovakia.  It examines how reformed and congregational churches in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire engaged with the natural sciences from the 17th to mid 20th centuries.  

Awards and Honours

I've held fellowships at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, UCLA’s Clark Library, the Science Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, the Huntington Library and Durham's Institute of Advance Studies. My work has been supported by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Royal Society of London. Over the years my research has been profiled by Inside Higher Ed, the BBC, The Scotsman, Yahoo News and Apple News, and I have acted as a historical consultant for several BBC documentaries. I presently sit on the editorial boards of History of the Human Sciences, History of Education and Notes and Records of the Royal Society. 

Publications

Monographs

Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 550 pp + 120 figures. 

The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry, and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750-1800 (London: Routledge, 2008 hardback; 2016 paperback), xx + 332 pp. Honorable mention for the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Neville Prize.

Edited Volumes

Scientific Instructions and Colonial Information, 1700-1850, co-edited with Linda Andersson Burnett  and Maria Florutau (forthcoming).

The Enlightened Diarist: Gender, Science and Sociability in the Life of Jane Ewbank of York, co-edited with Jane Rendall and Rachel Feldberg (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming).

A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century, Co-edited with Ursula Klein (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).  This is volume 4 out of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Chemistry, Volumes 1-6.  The entire series was named one of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2023, the only edited series to be given the award in 2023.

Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014); Volume 29 in the History of Science Society’s Osiris series.  Co-edited with William R. Newman and Seymour Mauskopf.

Prehistoric Minds: Human Origins as a Cultural Artefact, 1780-2010, Special Issue, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (London: Royal Society Publishing, 2011). 

William Paley's Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Co-edited with David M. Knight. Reprinted numerous times. 

Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (London: Routledge, 2005 hardback, 2017 paperback), Co-edited with David M. Knight.

Articles and Book Chapters

‘Information Against Empire: How a Black Surgeon Used Environmental Health Data to Challenge the Rise of Scientific Racism in Colonial Sierra Leone’, Scientific Instructions and Colonialism, 1700-1850’, in Linda Andersson Burnett, Maria Florutau, Matthew Daniel Eddy (Eds.), (forthcoming 2025).  

‘Recalculating Equality: Race and the Environmental Health Models of Dr James Africanus Beale Horton in British Africa during the Nineteenth Century’, Medical History  (forthcoming 2025).

‘Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy for Middle-Class Women in Late Georgian Yorkshire’, in Matthew Daniel Eddy, Jane Rendall and Rachel Feldberg (Eds.), The Enlightened Diarist: Gender, Science and Sociability in the Life of Jane Ewbank of York (London: Boydell and Brewer: forthcoming 2025).

‘Society, Environment and the Chemistry and Daily Life during the Eighteenth Century’, in Matthew Daniel Eddy and Ursula Klein (Eds.), A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 113-135.

(with Ursula Klein), ‘The Core Concepts and Cultural Context of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry’, in Matthew Daniel Eddy and Ursula Klein (Eds.), A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

‘New Discovery Reveals How First African American Doctor Fought for Women’s Rights in Glasgow’, The Conversation, 8 October 2021. [Link]. Over 150,000 reads/downloads:

·        Republished as feature articles by Apple News, Yahoo News, Florida News Times, Today News, Western Morning News, and Glasgow Live.

·       Republished as a learning resource by Teaching Social Studies Journal (New Jersey Council for the Social Studies) [Link].

 ‘Diagrams’, in Anthony Grafton, Ann Blair and Anja Sylvia Goeing (Eds.), Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 397-401.

‘Family Notebooks, Mnemotechnics and the Rational Education of Margaret Monro’, in Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong and Christine von Oertzen (Eds.), Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 160-176, 269-272.

‘The Nature of Notebooks: How Enlightenment Schoolchildren Transformed the Tabula Rasa’, Journal of British Studies, 57(2018), 275-307.

‘Childmade Evidence: A Reflection on the Sources Used to Historicise Childhood’, Insights, Vol. 10, No. 15, 11 (2018), 1-10.

‘The Politics of Cognition: Liberalism and the Evolutionary Origins of Victorian Education’, British Journal for the History of Science, 50 (2017), 677-699. BJHS article with the highest number of downloads in 2018.

 ‘The Interactive Notebook: How Students Learned to Keep Notes During the Scottish Enlightenment’, Book History, 19(2016), 87-131.  Praised as a breakthrough study by Scott McLemee, ‘Notable History’, Inside Higher Ed, 22 June 2016.

‘The Cognitive Unity of Calvinist Pedagogy in Enlightenment Scotland’, in Ábrahám Kovács (Ed.), Reformed Churches Working Unity in Diversity: Global Historical, Theological and Ethical Perspectives (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2016), 46-60.

‘The Child Writer: Graphic Literacy and the Scottish Educational System’, History of Education, 45 (2016), 695-718.

‘Useful Pictures: Joseph Black and the Graphic Culture of Experimentation’, in Robert G. W. Anderson (Ed.), Cradle of Chemistry: The Early years of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 2015), 99-118.

‘How to See a Diagram: A Visual Anthropology of Chemical Affinity’, Osiris, 26 (2014), 178-196.

(With Seymour H. Mauskopf and William R. Newman), ‘An Introduction to Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World’, Osiris, 26 (2014), 1-15.

 ‘The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy’, Science in Context, 26 (2013), 215-245.

‘Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Readership’, in Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall (eds.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Vol. II: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707-1800 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2012), 297-309.

‘The Prehistoric Mind as a Historical Artefact’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 65 (2011), 1-8.

‘The Line of Reason: Hugh Blair, Spatiality and the Progressive Structure of Language’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 65 (2011), 9-24.

‘The Alphabets of Nature: Children, Books and Natural History in Scotland’, Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 25 (2010), 1-22.

‘The Sparkling Nectar of Spas: The Medical and Commercial Relevance of Mineral Water’, in Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (eds.), Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 198-226.

 ‘Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica’, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010), 227-252.

‘The Dark Side of Collecting: Early Modern Chemistry, Humanism and Classification’, Ambix, 55 (2008), 283-292.

‘An Adept in Medicine: Rev. Dr. William Laing, Nervous Complaints and the Commodification of Spa Water’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39 (2008), 1-13.

‘The Aberdeen Agricola: Chemical Principles and Practice in James Anderson’s Georgics and Geology’, in Lawrence M. Principe (ed.), New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 139-156.

 ‘The Medium of Signs: Nominalism, Language and Classification in the Early Thought of Dugald Stewart’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 37 (2006), 373-393.

‘Set in Stone: The Medical Language of Mineralogy in Scotland’, in David Knight and Matthew D. Eddy (eds.), Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2005), 77-94.

‘Scottish Chemistry, Classification and the Late Mineralogical Career of the “Ingenious” Professor John Walker’, British Journal for the History of Science, 37 (2004), 373-399.

‘Elements, Principles and the Narrative of Affinity’, Foundations of Chemistry, 6 (2004), 161-175.

 ‘The Science and Rhetoric of Paley’s Natural Theology’, Literature and Theology, 18 (2004), 1-22.

‘The University of Edinburgh Natural History Class Lists’, Archives of Natural History, 30 (2003), 97-117.

‘Scottish Chemistry, Classification and the Early Mineralogical Career of the “Ingenious” Rev. Dr. John Walker’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002), 411-438.

‘The Doctrine of Salts and Rev. John Walker’s Analysis of a Scottish Spa’, Ambix, 48 (2001), 137-160.

‘Geology, Mineralogy and Time in John Walker’s University of Edinburgh Natural History Lectures’, History of Science, 39(2001), 95-119.