Public Engagement

I am deeply committed to sharing and communicating my research with non-expert audiences, seeking to challenge dominant, Eurocentric narratives about the origins of the modern sciences. We so often hear stories about the history of science that focus on a narrow cast of men— the Galileos, Newtons, and Keplers—as having revolutionised the sciences in early modern Europe. However, much as it is today, the early modern world was highly globalised, with ideas, objects, and people moving and interacting across oceans. Different cultures’ understandings of the natural world travelled to Europe—often as a result of colonialism—and, in turn, played an important and still overlooked role in shaping burgeoning scientific debates. One of the most pressing issues in the history of science is thus to understand how locally-influenced ideas scale up to shape globally relevant scientific knowledge.

To share my research, which diversifies the history of science, with wider audiences, I have written several public engagement articles for History Workshop Online, the Royal Society Blog, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, and BlueSci: Cambridge University Science Magazine. In 2023, I was shortlisted as a BBC New Generation Thinker.