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-facing articles for the Los Angeles Review of Books, History Workshop Digital Magazine, the Royal Society Blog, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, the KCL Medicine and the Making of Race Blog, and BlueSci: Cambridge University Science Magazine. I have been interviewed about my research in the JHI Blog. I also delivered a University of Cambridge HE+ guest lecture in 2021 on "The Global Origins of Science" for sixth-form school students. In 2023, I was shortlisted as a BBC New Generation Thinker.