My Research

I’m a historian of science, technology and publishing in nineteenth-century Britain, with side-interests in the histories of religion, of childhood, and of tourism and leisure.

My main research interest is in the history of science communication, particularly the communication of scientific information to wider publics. I have usually investigated the ways in which people who are not scientific experts come to possess knowledge about the natural world; but I am about to embark on a substantial AHRC-funded project on the social, economic, and cultural history of the world’s oldest scientific journal, the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, first published in 1665.

I’ve written about science books aimed at children and at adults, and produced by groups as varied as late eighteenth-century Unitarians, and mid-nineteenth-century tourism publishers. My recent book, Steam-Powered Knowledge (2012)looks at the ways in which nineteenth-century publishers made use of new technologies to help them produce cheap, instructive publications for the masses. My focus is on the Edinburgh publishers W. & R. Chambers, with a particular emphasis on their use of new technologies of production and distribution, and the way they managed and controlled a business which stretched beyond Scotland to England and Ireland, and ultimately to North America.

If you want to know a bit about my research, you could watch my TEDx talk on ‘The Victorian Information Revolution‘, via YouTube.

A complete list of my research publications can be found via ‘Research@StAndrews‘.