Carl Abbott

• Master of Disaster, Ignatius Donnelly

Carl Abbott is the author of several books about the overlapping topics of the American West, the history of American cities, and science fiction, the most recent being Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). His shorter writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Atlantic CityLab. His sporadically updated website is www.theurbanwest.com.

Anthony Acciavatti

• Concrete Poetry: Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology. He is interested in experimental forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and design afforded by humanistic inquiry. His most recent book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (Applied Research & Design, 2015), is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century.

Max Adams

• John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion

Max Adams was born in London in 1961 and after more than twenty years as an archaeologist turned to writing. His first major biography, published in 2005, aimed to rescue the reputation of a neglected naval hero, Admiral Collingwood (Weidenfeld 2004). His group biography of artist John Martin's circle, The Prometheans was published in 2009 and was a Guardian Book of the Week. Max's third neglected-Geordie biography, just completed, is a life of the first Englishman of whom one could write a biography: Oswald, the Dark Age Northumbrian king and saint. Max is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Newcastle. His website: www.theambulist.co.uk/

Paulina L. Alberto

• The Black Dandy of Buenos Aires: Racial Fictions and the Search for Raúl Grigera

Paulina L. Alberto is Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University. She is a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work explores the intersections of ideas of race and nation in Latin America, with a focus on how Afro-Latin Americans have shaped and contested the region’s ideologies of racial inclusiveness in their ongoing struggles for recognition and equality. Alberto’s latest single-authored work is Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

• A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne
• The Uncertain Heavens: Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life
• Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault
• From Snowdrop to Nightjar: Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789)
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator. He is the author of Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe (Picador, 2020), as well as a cultural history of the chemical elements, Periodic Tales (Penguin, 2011), and The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century (Granta, 2015).

Noam Andrews

• The Polyhedral Perspective

Noam Andrews, a historian and architect, is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium. He has taught at Ghent University, New York University, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), and has been the recipient of fellowships from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Alex Andriesse

• Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History
• Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life: In Pursuit of the “Real” Chateaubriand
• Comic Gold: The Easterner Goes West in Three Early American Comics

Alex Andriesse received his doctorate in English literature from Boston College in 2013. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and The Millions. His translation of Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768–1800 is published by NYRB Classics, and another translation, of Roberto Bazlen's Notes Without a Text, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2019. In addition to editing the Review of Contemporary Fiction, he has also edited two volumes of the anthology Best European Fiction. He lives in the Netherlands. Find him on Twitter here

Sasha Archibald

• Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Sasha Archibald writes essays about 20th-century culture. Her writing has appeared in The Point, The New Yorker, Places Journal, Cabinet, The White Review, The Believer, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and in books and catalogues published by the Walker Art Center, Culturgest, Armory Center for the Arts, and other institutions. She has also taught and guest-lectured at California Institute of the Arts, University of California Berkeley, and Portland State University. She was an editor for many years at the art-and-culture quarterly Cabinet, and remains an editor-at-large.

Noga Arikha

• As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy

Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas who endeavours to bridge the divide between sciences and the arts & humanities, especially with regard to our minds and bodies. She was raised an anglophone in Paris, and lived in London and New York before returning in 2011 to her native city, where she is Chair of Critical Studies at Paris College of Art. She told the story of how humoural theory sustained medicine and psychology for 2500 years in her Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007), a Washington Post best book of 2007. She has also co-authored with her husband Marcello Simonetta Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power (Palgrave, 2011). She received a PhD from the Warburg Institute in 2001, was a Fellow at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies at Columbia University, and has taught at Bard College and at the Bard Graduate Center, NY. Her website: www.nogaarikha.com.

Gregorio Astengo

• “More Lively Counterfaits”: Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science

Gregorio Astengo is an architect and historian. He holds a Ph.D from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and is currently Scientific Assistant at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich. He is currently working on a Postdoctoral research project on construction manuals and speculative housing in early modern London.

Elaine Ayers

• Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology
• It is Disturbing to Find
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Elaine Ayers is a PhD candidate in Princeton University's Program in the History of Science. She works on natural history, aesthetics, and gender in the Victorian tropics.

Philip Ball

• Worlds Without End
• Primary Sources: A Natural History of the Artist’s Palette

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and broadcaster. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences and then as a Consultant Editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology. His books include Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (Penguin, 2002), Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (University Of Chicago Press, 2015) and most recently, How To Grow a Human (William Collins, 2019).

Laura Bang

• The History of the Ordinary

Laura Bang is the Digital and Special Collections Curatorial Assistant at Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library. She designs exhibits (both on site and online), oversees the Digital Library scanning operations, and enjoys reading dime novels from the popular literature collection.

Julian Barnes

• An Unlikely Lunch: When Maupassant met Swinburne

Julian Barnes is the author of three books of stories, books of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and numerous novels, including Metroland published in 1980. His recent publications include Pulse, a collection of short stories, and The Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize. In France, he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 2004 he became a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In England his honors include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the San Clemente literary prize. In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Awarded biennially, the prize honours a lifetime’s achievement in literature for a writer in the English language who is a citizen of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.

Brett Beasely

• Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880)

Brett Beasley is a doctoral student at Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on attitudes toward death in late nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Matthew Beaumont

• The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque
• “Fevers of Curiosity”: Charles Baudelaire and the Convalescent Flâneur

Matthew Beaumont’s most recent book is The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020). He teaches in the Department of English at UCL, and is a co-director of the UCL Urban Lab. He is also the author of Utopia Ltd. (2005), The Spectre of Utopia (2012), and Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic (2009). He has edited several essay collections, including Restless Cities (2010).

Susanna Berger

• The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris

Susanna Berger is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching explore diverse facets of art and visual culture from printed and drawn illustrations of philosophical knowledge to central works in the history of European early modern painting. Her first book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment, appeared with Princeton University Press in March 2017.

Dorothy Berry

• Black America, 1895
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library at Harvard University. She received her MLS from Indiana University, as well as an MA in Ethnomusicology from the same institution, following a BA in Music Performance from Mills College. Previously she worked as the Metadata and Digitization Lead for Umbra Search African American History at University of Minnesota, as a Mellon Fellow at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and also as a graduate assistant at the Black Film Center/Archive and the Archives of African American Music and Culture.

John Bevis

• Stuffed Ox, Dummy Tree, Artificial Rock: Deception in the Work of Richard and Cherry Kearton

John Bevis is an English freelance writer specializing in nature and the arts, poetry and criticism. His writing career goes hand-in-hand with working in editing, printing and publishing. Books include Printed in Norfolk (RGAP, 2012), a history of the gallery and artists’ publisher Coracle Press, and Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds (MIT Press, 2010) a study of the various ways we attempt to capture, preserve and imitate the songs of birds, with a lexicon of "bird words". His work is discussed by Ross Hair in Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present (Liverpool UP, 2016). His latest book The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography, published in 2016 by Uniformbooks. For more information and contact, go to www.johnbevis.com.

Matthew H. Birkhold

• The Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis

Matthew H. Birkhold is the author of Characters before Copyright (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is currently writing a cultural history of icebergs. More at matthewhbirkhold.com.

Tobiah Black

• From Fire Hazards to Family Trees: The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Tobiah Black is a writer and Emmy Award–winning documentary producer. His documentary work has appeared on National Geographic, Smithsonian Channel, and Disney+. His fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, Tilted House Review, MORIA, and other journals. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, daughter, and cat.

Philipp Blom

• A Dangerous Man in the Pantheon

Philipp Blom was born in Hamburg and trained as a historian in Vienna and Oxford. His historical works include To Have and To Hold, a history of collectors and collecting, Encyclopédie, a history of the Encyclopaedia by Diderot and d'Alembert that sparked the Enlightenment in France, and The Vertigo Years, a cultural history of the era 1900 to 1914 in Europe and the United States. He frequently contributes articles to the Financial Times, the Independent, and the Guardian among others. A host of cultural programming on Austrian National Radio, he lives in Vienna.

Patrick Borer

• Ambassadors, Milkmaids, and Hot Air Balloons

Patrick Borer is a librarian in the cataloguing department of the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn. Besides his principal duty of cataloguing modern monographs, he is an assistant member of the ZBS IT staff and cultivates relations with the Wikimedia community.

Leon Botstein

• What Makes Franz Liszt Still Important?

Leon Botstein is music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He is founder and coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival, which celebrates its 22nd season this year at Bard College, the institution he has served as president since 1975. He is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and the author of many articles and books. For his contributions to music he has received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. He is a recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Academic Leadership Award and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Peter J. Bowler

• H. G. Wells and the Uncertainties of Progress

Peter J. Bowler is Professor emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University, Belfast. In addition to a number of books on the history of biology — including Fossils and Progress (Science History Publications, 1976) and The Eclipse of Darwinism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) — most recently he has published A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Jessica Boyall

• The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships

Jessica Boyall is an independent researcher and writer. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in film and television history and a researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has worked on a number of curatorial projects at the V&A, edited catalogues for the Design Museum in London, curated displays at the Museum of London, and written on art and literature for various publications including ARTUK and The Guardian.

Benjamin Breen

• Painting the New World
• Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia
• Astral Travels with Jack London
• Made in Taiwan? How a Frenchman Fooled 18th-Century London
• “Theire Soe Admirable Herbe”: How the English Found Cannabis

Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of the book The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Juliette Bretan

• Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Juliette Bretan is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, researching Anglophone and Polish literature of the early 20th century. She has previously featured on the BBC World Service, and written for the Sunday Times, The Independent, Euronews, and CultureTrip about Polish culture (especially of the interwar period) and current affairs.

Joseph Bristow

• On Oscar Wilde and Plagiarism

Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

James Brown

• Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850

Dr James Brown is currently Knowledge Exchange Programme Manager at the University of Sheffield. He has a background in academic history, specialising in cultures of drinking and intoxication in early modern England, and was previously Research Associate on and Project Manager of the HERA-funded research project Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850. He is also interested in the digital humanities; project and programme management; and public engagement, knowledge exchange, and impact.

Jane Brox

• The Silent Treatment: Solitary Confinement’s Unlikely Origins

Jane Brox’s fifth book, Silence, was published in January 2019, and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It received the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her previous book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

Bernd Brunner

• Human Forms in Nature: Ernst Haeckel’s Trip to South Asia and Its Aftermath
• Bringing the Ocean Home

Bernd Brunner writes at the crossroads of culture, history, and science, and is the author of, among others, Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds (Greystone Books, Allen & Unwin), Bears: A Brief History (Yale University Press), and The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (Reaktion Books). Website: www.berndbrunner.com

Ross Bullen

• George Washington at the Siamese Court
• Race and the White Elephant War of 1884
• William Wells Brown, Wildcat Banker
• Jumbo’s Ghost: Elephants and Machines in Motion

Ross Bullen is a writer and teacher living in Toronto. His work has appeared in The Public Domain Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, American Literature, and elsewhere. Ross is an Assistant Professor of English at OCAD University. You can read more of his work here.

D. Graham Burnett

• Out From Behind This Mask

D. Graham Burnett is based in New York City. He writes and makes things. He is associated with the research collective ESTAR(SER) and teaches at Princeton University. He edits the Conjectures series for The Public Domain Review.

Raphael Calel

• The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics

Dr. Raphael Calel is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. His research has looked at the history of climate change politics, the effects of current policies, and how climate forecasts can be used to inform future action. More information and links to his other writings are available from his personal website.

Zach Carmichael

• Filling in the Blanks: A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze

Zach Carmichael is Local History and Genealogy Specialist II at the Carnegie Library, Muncie, IN. He has an MA in history from Miami University (OH), where he studied colonial New England taverns, and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, where he specialized in archives. On Twitter here.

Vincent Carretta

• An 18th-Century Genius in Bondage: The Poems and Politics of Phillis Wheatley

Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011), and the editor of Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (Penguin Classics) (Penguin Putnam Inc., 2001).

William C. Carter

• Lost in Translation: Proust and Scott Moncrieff

William C. Carter is distinguished Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His biography Marcel Proust: A Life was selected as a "Notable Book of 2000" by The New York Times. His new annotated edition of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s Way is now available from Yale University Press and in bookstores. Carter’s website is Proust-ink.com.

Christopher S. Celenza

• Machiavelli, Comedian

Christopher S. Celenza is the Vice Dean for Humanities and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and served as Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2010-14. His most recent book is Machiavelli: A Portrait (Harvard University Press, 2015).

Julian Chehirian

• Last Pole

Julian Chehirian is an artist and PhD student in the History of Science at Princeton University. He writes on the history of psychological sciences and curates exhibitions at the intersection of art and public history.

Alex Christofi

• Reborn Into a New Form (1849)

Alex Christofi is Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers and the author of Glass (2015), Let Us Be True (2017), and Dostoevsky in Love (2021). His essays and reviews have been published in the Guardian, New Humanist, Prospect, The White Review, The Brixton Review of Books and The London Magazine.

Lara Langer Cohen

• The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics

Lara Langer Cohen is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture, and coeditor of Early African American Print Culture.

Lauren Collee

• Marxist Astronomy: The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek

Lauren Collee is a writer and doctoral researcher looking at the Dark Sky movement at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her essays and short fiction have been published in Real Life Mag, Another Gaze, Overland Journal, Uneven Earth, and more.

Steven Connor

• The Dust That Measures All Our Time
• Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts

Steven Connor is Director of Research of the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College, London. He is Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus in the University of Cambridge, and an Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His most recent books are The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (London: Reaktion/Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019), Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019) and A History of Asking (London: Open Humanities Press, 2023).

James J. Conway

• Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex

James J. Conway was born in Sydney and now lives in Berlin where he is a translator from German to English, both commercial and literary. In the latter capacity he has translated and published eight books for Rixdorf Editions, most recently Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler. He has written for publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as his own repository of alternative cultural history, Strange Flowers.

Kensy Cooperrider

• Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine

Kensy Cooperrider is a cognitive scientist, writer, teacher, and podcaster. He earned a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California — San Diego in 2011. His work explores the intersections of language, culture, body, and mind, and has included forays into finger names, Darwin’s metaphors, pointing gestures, time concepts, the history of measurement, and the evolution of language. Kensy’s writing has appeared in Aeon, Atlas Obscura, and Nautilus, among other places. He also hosts Many Minds, a podcast about our world’s diverse varieties of mind, within and beyond our species.

Jon Crabb

• Notes on the Fourth Dimension
• The Strange Case of Mr William T. Horton
• Woodcuts and Witches

Jon Crabb is a writer and editor with interests in the fin-de-siècle, forgotten culture, the esoteric and anything generally weird and wonderful. He lives in London and works as Editor for British Library Publishing. He also runs their twitter feed, which he would like you to check out now.

Daniel Crown

• The Price of Suffering: William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption

Daniel Crown is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Queens, New York. He writes predominately about history and books, with a strong emphasis on colonial America.

Gillian Daniel

• The Legend of the Divine Farmer

Gillian Daniel is a Graduate Trainee at the Wellcome Trust and the creator of the popular fashion and art Instagram page @FashoftheTitans. She has a MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialised in contemporary Chinese art.

Dr Kevin Dann

• Dr Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon
• The Spiralist
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Kevin Dann’s books include Enchanted New York: A Journey Along Broadway Through Manhattan’s Magical Past (2020) and Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau (2017). He leads extra-vagant bike tours in New York City. More at: www.drdann.com.

Nandini Das

• Richard Hakluyt and Early English Travel

Nandini Das is a literary and cultural historian, and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. In multiple essays and books such as Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (2007), Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011), and Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, co-edited with Nick Davis (2016), she has explored the genre of romance, Renaissance prose fiction, and the place of the everyday in late sixteenth century literature.

Chelsea Davis

• Sicko Doctors: Suffering and Sadism in 19th-Century America

Chelsea Davis is a writer and critic living in San Francisco. Her essays have appeared on Literary Hub and Electric Literature, among other platforms. She holds a PhD in English from Stanford University, where her research focused on narrative representations of violence — from horror film to war fiction to apocalyptic rhetoric to the literary Gothic. She is currently at work on a series of essays about the generic intersections of horror and comedy. More of her writing is available on her website.

Ray Davis

• Tales from Tahiti

Ray Davis is an occasional essayist who publishes his own work at Pseudopodium and the work of others at The Bellona Times Repress.

Christopher DeCou

• Woodblocks in Wonderland: The Japanese Fairy Tale Series

Christopher DeCou is researching his PhD at the University of Michigan and writes about science and history.

Frank Delaney

• Seeing Joyce
• Time and Place: Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)
• The Tale of Beatrix Potter

Frank Delaney, writer and broadcaster, lives in the United States, where he deconstructs Ulysses in brief weekly podcasts on his website: www.frankdelaney.com.

Colin Dickey

• The Redemption of Saint Anthony

Colin Dickey is the author of three books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. He co-edited (with Joanna Ebenstein) The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, and he is a member of The Order of the Good Death. His next book, The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, is forthcoming in Summer of 2020.

Sam Dolbear

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Scott Donaldson

• A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of America's leading literary biographers, Scott Donaldson has written eight books about 20th century American authors. These include Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott (1972), By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), John Cheever: A Biography (1988), Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992), winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999), Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (2007), named the best biography of the year by Contemporary Poetry Forum, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (2009). The present article is excerpted from the preface to a new paperback edition of his Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald from the University of Minnesota Press.

Catherine Draycott

• The Wellcome Library’s Top 10 Open Images

Catherine Draycott has been Head of Wellcome Images since 1992. She was a Director of the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies from 1997 to 2011 and was its Chairman from 2000 to 2007. She is responsible for the management and development of Wellcome Images' collection which spans the history of medicine and civilisation from antiquity to the present day with over 180,000 images available online. In 2008 she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Combined Royal Colleges Medal for contribution to the use of images in medicine.

Hunter Dukes

• Postures of Transport: Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Hunter Dukes is managing editor of The Public Domain Review and Cabinet.

Kevin Duong

• Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will

Kevin Duong is an assistant professor at Bard College. His research focuses on democracy and political violence, with an area focus on modern French political thought and intellectual history. At Bard, he teaches classes on the history of political thought, on gender and sexuality, and on various topics in modern intellectual history and European political development.

Nadja Durbach

• Re-examining “the Elephant Man”

Nadja Durbach was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Canada. She completed her BA (Hons.) in 1993 at the University of British Columbia and her PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2000. She is currently Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of two books: Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is currently working on a book about the politics of food in Modern Britain.

Edward Duyker

• Labillardière and his Relation

Edward Duyker is the author of Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), Miegunyah/Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2003. This biography won the New South Wales Premier’s General History Prize in 2004. He is Adjunct Professor of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Australian Catholic University, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies, University of Sydney. In 2007 he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Stassa Edwards

• The Naturalist and the Neurologist: On Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne
• Through the Cheval Glass: Reproduction in the Photographs of Clementina Hawarden

Stassa Edwards is a writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in numerous outlets, including Lapham's Quarterly, Aeon, Cabinet, Dwell, and Slate.

Joshua Ehrlich

• The Calcutta Pococurante Society: Public and Private in India’s Age of Reform

Joshua Ehrlich is a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University, currently writing a dissertation on the East India Company and the politics of knowledge. He has published previously on intellectual history and the history of political thought in Europe and South Asia.

Carlos M. N. Eire

• The Reluctant Levitator: Teresa of Avila’s Humble Raptures

Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is the author of They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Waiting for Snow in Havana, winner of the National Book Award, and of War Against the Idols; A Very Brief History of Eternity; and Reformations. He lives in Guilford, CT.

Erica X Eisen

• “The Mark of the Beast”: Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement
• The Kept and the Killed
• In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Erica X Eisen’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Baffler, n+1, The Boston Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. She received her bachelor’s degree in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University with a focus on Japanese art and her MA in Buddhist Art History & Conservation from The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is an editor at Hypocrite Reader. Her writing can be found at www.ericaxeisen.com.

Daniel Elkind

• Exquisite Rot: Spalted Wood and the Lost Art of Intarsia
• Eastern Sports and Western Bodies: The “Indian Club” in the United States

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator in San Francisco.

Michael Engelhard

• Darwin’s Polar Bear

Michael Engelhard is the author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon (University of Washington Press). Trained as an anthropologist, he now lives in Fairbanks, Alaska and works as a wilderness guide in the Arctic.

Michael Erard

• The Polyglot of Bologna

Author and linguist Michael Erard is the author of Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. Website: http://www.babelnomore.com.

​​Octavian Esanu

• [Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory

​​Octavian Esanu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History, at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Director/Curator of AUB Art Galleries. In this position, he oversaw the inauguration of the two galleries, and has curated and published on modernist and contemporary art from Lebanon and the Middle East on topics related to their intersection with wider currents in global art. He holds a doctoral degree from Duke University and has also researched and published on Moscow Conceptualism and the transition to “contemporary art” that took place in the art of post-Soviet and other postsocialist Eastern European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the late 1990s he founded, directed and curated for the Soros Center for Contemporary Art Chisinau (Moldova). He has degrees in studio art (Ilya Repin School of Art, Chisinau), in Interior Architecture (The Moldovan State Institute of Arts) and in Critical Theory from the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht).

Dorinda Evans

• Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies

Dorinda Evans is a professor emerita at Emory University. She has written five books on American art and artists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ranging from Gilbert Stuart to William Rimmer.

Richard Fallon

• Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature

Richard Fallon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum and a knowledge exchange fellow at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on literary culture’s relationship with geology and palaeontology. Richard received his doctorate in English from the University of Leicester in 2019 and completed a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Birmingham in 2023. His books Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature (Cambridge University Press) and Creatures of Another Age (Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books) were published in 2021.

Patricia Fara

• Joseph Banks: Portraits of a Placid Elephant

Patricia Fara lectures in the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge University, where she is the Senior Tutor of Clare College. Her major research specialities are science in eighteenth-century England and scientific imagery, but she also writes and lectures on topics related to women in science. A regular contributor to popular journals as well as radio and TV, she has published a range of

Ryan Feigenbaum

• Visions of Algae in Eighteenth-Century Botany

Ryan Feigenbaum is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Villanova University, finishing his dissertation on the epistemic foundations of eighteenth-century German biology. He recently completed an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at The New York Botanical Garden, where he created a digital exhibition about poetic botany, a late-eighteenth century movement in which botany became the subject of poetry.

Kathy E. Ferguson

• Emma Goldman’s “Anarchism Without Adjectives”

Kathy E. Ferguson is Professor in Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Hawai`i and author of a forthcoming book on Goldman titled Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

Devon Field

• The Khan’s Drinking Fountain

Devon Field is the writer and host of Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a narrative history podcast about medieval travellers. He received his M.A. in Humanities from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., the city where he now lives and teaches writing to small children. Twitter: @circus_human

Paula Findlen

• Petrarch’s Plague: Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic

Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University and Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

Mary Fissell

• When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle’s Masterpiece

Mary Fissell teaches the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins and edits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. She writes about the ways that ordinary people in the past understood the natural world and their bodies. Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) explored how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large scale social changes. She is currently writing a cultural history of Aristotle's Masterpiece.

Peter Fitting

• Stories of a Hollow Earth

Peter Fitting is professor emeritus of French and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His work has focused primarily on utopian fiction and on 20th century science fiction. In 2004 he published Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology (Wesleyan UP). For more information on these topics and samples of his work see: The Society for Utopian Studies and Science Fiction Studies.

Lily Ford

• “For the Sake of the Prospect”: Experiencing the World from Above in the Late 18th Century
• “Unlimiting the Bounds”: the Panorama and the Balloon View

Lily Ford works on the cultural history of flight, and finished her thesis on "airmindedness" in 1920s Britain last year at Birkbeck, University of London. She also produces essay films at the Derek Jarman Lab, including this year's The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger.

Brad Fox

• Portrait of a Scaphander

Brad Fox is the author of The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths (Astra House, 2023) and the novel To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, and The Paris Review Daily.

Emily Lord Fransee

• Mistress of a New World: Early Science Fiction in Europe’s “Age of Discovery”

Emily Lord Fransee is a historian who studies colonialism, gender, citizenship, and science fiction. She recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Freeman

• Cuttings from a Medieval Italian Choirbook

James Freeman is an Intern in the Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Section at the British Library, where he catalogues manuscripts and contributes to the award-winning Medieval Manuscripts Blog. He completed his PhD on the manuscript dissemination and readership of Ranulph Higden’s ‘Polychronicon’ at the University of Cambridge in 2013, and will be travelling to the US in 2015 to continue his research with visiting fellowships at the Beinecke, Houghton, Huntington and Newberry Libraries.

Randall Fuller

• “To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

Randall Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. His books include Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (Oxford University Press, 2007); From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011); and a New York Times “notable book”, The Book that Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (Viking, 2017). He is the recipient of the Christian Gauss Award for best literary criticism, two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Amanda Gagel

• Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster: Pacifism and the Avant-Garde

Amanda Gagel is a professional editor, with a specialization in editions based on manuscript materials. She serves as an editor for the multi-volume edition, Selected Letters of Vernon Lee (1856–1935) (Vol. 1. London: Routledge Publishers, 2017) and has served as an associate editor for the Mark Twain Project and for the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. She is currently custom books editor at XanEdu Publishing. Dr Gagel received her PhD from the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Find her on Twitter @mandygagel

Julie Gardham

• The Mysteries of Nature and Art

Julie Gardham is Senior Assistant Librarian at Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library. She regularly blogs on her work with rare books and manuscripts: see the Special Collections website.

Rhonda K. Garelick

• Loie Fuller and the Serpentine

Rhonda Garelick is Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School. She is the author of Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2007), from which this essay has been adapted; Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Random House, 2014), and Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Siecle (Princeton, 1999). Her column Reading the Signs" appears in New York Magazine's The Cut. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Twitter: @rkgar

Brian Garret

• The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew

Brian Jonathan Garrett is professor of philosophy at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. Selected publications include: "What the history of vitalism teaches us about the Hard problem of consciousness" Philosophy and phenomenological research 2006, "Teleology and Vitalism in the Natural Philosophy of Nehemiah Grew" British Journal for the History of Science 2003 and "Santayana's Treatment of teleology" Bulletin of the Santayana Society 2010. His research combines history of biology and contemporary metaphysics. In particular, he researches how the history of evolution, vitalism and teleology bears on puzzles concerning mental causation, determinism and free will.

Aimée Gasston

• Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield

Aimée Gasston is the author of the book Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Palgrave Macmillan 2021). She was winner of the fourth Katherine Mansfield Essay Prize and a Harry Ransom Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, and now co-edits Katherine Mansfield Studies (Edinburgh University Press) with Gerri Kimber. She works in the field of information law.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

• 100 Years of The Secret Garden

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is chair of the department of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and teaches courses on the novel, biography, Bloomsbury and black literature of Britain and America. She is the author or editor of seven books, including a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett and two editions of The Secret Garden. Her most recent book is Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend. She hosts the nationally-syndicated radio program "The Book Show", interviewing authors on their recent books of literary fiction, biography and history.

Henry Giardina

• The Empathetic Camera: Frank Norris and the Invention of Film Editing

Henry Giardina is a writer living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily and Berfrois among other publications. His criticism, essays and interviews can be found at henrygiardina.com.

Terry Gifford

• John Muir’s Literary Science

Terry Gifford is Professor of English at Bath Spa University and University of Alicante. The article is an adapted extract from Chapter 3 of his book Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (2006). It also features material in his John Muir: The Life and Letters and Other Writings (1996).

Bennett Gilbert

• The Dreams of an Inventor in 1420

Bennett Gilbert is an Instructor in interdisciplinary philosophy and history at Portland State University. He has written and published papers on various aspects of the history of ideas from antiquity to the present, with particular interests in the history of books and the history of communications. His work appears in the Journal of the Philosophy of History and is writing a forthcoming book on the philosophy of history. He is also working on the history of concepts of replication of texts and imagery.

John Glassie

• Athanasius, Underground
• “Invisible Little Worms”: Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague

John Glassie has written for The Believer, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and The Washington Post, among other publications. This essay was adapted from his biography of Athanasius Kircher, A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, which was a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice".

Andrew Glazzard

• Inside the Empty House: Sherlock Holmes, For King and Country

Andrew Glazzard recently completed a doctorate in English literature at the University of London. He has written on Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and is currently writing a book on Conrad and popular fiction.

The Global Experimental Historiography Collective

• Food Pasts, Food Futures: The Culinary History of COVID-19

The Global Experimental Historiography Collective is a project by Stav Bejerano, Caroline Castleman, Mika Hyman, Jasper Jarecki, Alissa Nalewajko, and Peter Schmidt.

Jonathan Goldman

• When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair

Jonathan Goldman (Professor, New York Institute of Technology) is author of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, editor of Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture and editor of Joyce and the Law. His work about Dorothy Parker comes out of his website project "NYC 1920: 100 Years Ago Today (When We Became Modern)." His website / his Twitter.

Matthew Goodman

• Elizabeth Bisland’s Race Around the World

Matthew Goodman is the author of the narrative histories Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World (2013) and The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (2008). He can be contacted at his website.

Anthony Grafton

• Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy

Anthony Grafton is the author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

Andrew Gray

• Canada Through a Lens: the British Library Colonial Copyright Collection

Andrew Gray was the Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library from 2012-13, and has worked with Wikimedia projects since 2004. He currently works as a librarian in Cambridge.

Jonathan Gray

• “Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination

Jonathan Gray is Prize Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath where he is writing a book on Data Worlds. He is also Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam; Research Associate at the médialab at Sciences Po; and Tow Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University. He is Senior Advisor at Open Knowledge International and cofounder of The Public Domain Review. More about him can be found at jonathangray.org and he is on Twitter at @jwyg.

Adam Green

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Matthew Green

• The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse
• The Secret History of Holywell Street: Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade
• The City That Fell Off a Cliff

Matthew Green is a historian and broadcaster with a doctorate from the University of Oxford. He writes for national newspapers, has appeared in many television documentaries, and is the author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time and Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. He lives in London.

Rhys Griffiths

• Brief Encounters with Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck

Rhys Griffiths is a London based writer and editor and Assistant Editor at History Today. @rhyswgriffiths

Julia Grimes

• Armenians and Armenian Photographers in the Ottoman Empire

Julia Grimes is completing her Ph.D. in Chinese modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute since 2010.

Kenneth Gross

• Of Angel and Puppet: Klee, Rilke, and the Test of Innocence

Kenneth Gross teaches English at the University of Rochester, and lives in both Rochester and Brooklyn, NY. “Of Puppet and Angel” is taken from the closing chapter of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (2011), which won the 2012 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Gross’s other books include Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (1985); The Dream of the Moving Statue (1992); and Shylock is Shakespeare (2006). He is the editor of On Dolls (2018), an anthology of writings on puppets, dolls, and automata, and of The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History (2016), a series of lectures by John Hollander. His most recent book, Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story, will be published in fall 2022.

Pat Hadley

• Tempest Anderson: Pioneer of Volcano Photography

Pat Hadley is Yorkshire’s Wikimedia Ambassador and works helping museums open up their collections online.

Claire Hall

• Same as It Ever Was?: Eternal Recurrence in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Claire Hall is a research fellow at Durham and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is working on a book on ancient ideas about the future and future prediction, and has published on the history of prophecy, astrology, and dream interpretation.

Richard Hamblyn

• The Krakatoa Sunsets

Richard Hamblyn’s books include The Invention of Clouds, which won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Terra: Tales of the Earth (2009), a study of natural disasters; and The Art of Science(2011), an anthology of readable science writing from the Babylonians to the Higgs Boson. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.

David C. Hanrahan

• The Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval

David C. Hanrahan is the author of The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval.

Matthew Hargraves

• William Blake and Paul Mellon: The Life of the Mind

Matthew Hargraves is Chief Curator of Art Collections and Head of Collections Information and Access at the Yale Center for British Art. He specializes in British art of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is the author of Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain (Yale UP, 2006); Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale UP, 2007); Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp (YCBA, 2010); and A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany (Paul Holberton, 2014).

Jack Hartnell

• The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man

Dr Jack Hartnell is Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, New York, where his research focuses on the visual culture of medieval medicine, cartography, and mathematics. He is preparing a book on the Wound Man, as well as an introduction to medieval medical visual culture soon to be published by the Wellcome Trust and Profile Books, entitled Medieval Bodies (2017).

Katherine Harvey

• Iconology of a Cardinal: Was Wolsey Really so Large?
• Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine

Katherine Harvey is a UK-based historian, writer and reviewer, specialising in medieval history. She holds a BA, MA and PhD in History from King’s College London, is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and teaches for both Birkbeck and the Open University. She has published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals, including BBC History Magazine, History Today, Aeon and The Atlantic. She reviews regularly for publications including the The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent book, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, was published by Reaktion in October 2021.

Dr. Phil Hatfield

• Canada Through a Lens: the British Library Colonial Copyright Collection

Dr. Phil Hatfield is Curator for Canadian and Caribbean Studies at the British Library, you can find more of his work on the British Library Americas Blog. Previously he was an ESRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award student working with this very collection, making it something of a labour of love over the past six years. A review of the thesis can be found here.

Keith C. Heidorn

• The Snowflake Man of Vermont

Keith C. Heidorn, PhD has nearly forty years of experience in meteorology, climatology, air quality assessment, and education. Currently, enjoying semi-retirement in the Canadian Rockies, he continues to write The Weather Doctor internet site. The site, now beginning its fourteenth year, celebrates the beauty of weather through science and art. Dr Heidorn is author of three books: The BC Weather Book: From the Sunshine Coast to Storm Mountain, published in 2004, And Now...The Weather, released in July 2005, and The Field Guide to Natural Phenomena, coauthored with Ian Whitelaw, released in 2010. When not writing about the weather, Keith can be found painting weather and other landscapes using oil, acrylics and watercolors.

Thomas Henry

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Eugenia Herbert

• Julia Margaret Cameron in Ceylon: Idylls of Freshwater vs. Idylls of Rathoongodde

Eugenia Herbert is Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of books on American, European and African History, including Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa. She is the author of Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India.

Dr. Lynley Anne Herbert

• Boys will be Boys: Playing Around in a 17th-Century Friendship Book

Dr Lynley Anne Herbert is the Robert and Nancy Hall Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. She received her doctorate in May, 2012, from the University of Delaware, and while the subject of her dissertation was a Carolingian manuscript, her research interests also include later manuscripts and early printed books. The above discussion of the Walters’ liber amicorum is part of a larger article soon to be published in the Journal of the Walters Art Museum.

Jennifer Higgie

• “The Substantiality of Spirit”: Georgiana Houghton’s Pictures from the Other Side

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine, she has written and illustrated a children’s book, There’s Not One, is the author of the novel Bedlam, and is the author of The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience — Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits.

Karlos K. Hill

• Photographing the Tulsa Massacre of 1921

Karlos K. Hill is the author of three groundbreaking books: Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2020), and The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). He founded the Tulsa Race Massacre Oklahoma Teacher’s Institute to support teaching the history of the race massacre to thousands of middle school and high school students. Hill also serves on the boards of the Clara Luper Legacy Committee and the Board of Scholars for Facing History and Ourselves, and is actively engaged on other community initiatives working toward racial reconciliation.

Paige Hirschey

• Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes

Paige Hirschey is an independent writer and critic specializing in the intersection of art, science, and technology. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto.

Mark Hobbs

• Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin

Mark Hobbs graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2010 with a PhD in German art and architecture of the Weimar Republic. He currently works as a content specialist at the British Library in London, and is planning to finish his first novel any decade now. For more information visit: www.markhobbs.info

Henrik Holm

• Visual Nation Making and Forgetting

Henrik Holm, MA. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Former head of education at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, currently curator at Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark, in charge of The Royal Cast Collection. Henrik Holm is co-author of the book Nature Strikes Back. Man and Nature in Western Art (SMK, Copenhagen 2010).

Nick Hopwood

• Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution

Nick Hopwood is Reader in History of Science and Medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Embryos in Wax: Models from the Ziegler Studio (Whipple Museum, 2002) and Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago, 2015), co-editor of Models: The Third Dimension of Science (Stanford, 2004) and co-curator of Making Visible Embryos, an online exhibition (2008).

Daniel Horst

• Carel and Abraham Allard in the Court of Momus

Daniel Horst was born in the United States in 1958. He studied art history at the University of Amsterdam and received his doctorate in 2000 at the Free University Amsterdam for a dissertation about printmaking and propaganda during the Dutch Revolt. He publishes regularly on religious and political prints from the sixteenth and later centuries. He has been a research associate at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam since 2006.

Steven Howe

• The Tragedy of Fate and the Tragedy of Culture: Heinrich von Kleist’s The Schroffenstein Family

Steven Howe is Associate Research Fellow in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. He is currently working, together with Ricarda Schmidt (Exeter) and Sean Allan (Warwick), on a large-scale, AHRC-funded project – timed to coincide with the bicentenary of the author’s death – exploring discourses of education and violence in the works of Heinrich von Kleist (Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics). He has previously written a full-length study on Kleist’s engagement with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and published further articles regarding the representation of violence in Kleist’s texts, and on aspects of their popular and critical reception.

Richard Howells

• The Unsinkable Myth

Richard Howells is a cultural sociologist at King’s College, London. He combines a background in the humanities (Visual Studies at Harvard) and the social sciences (Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge). In 2004 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. He specialises in visual and popular culture, combining theory and practice to explore case studies as seemingly diverse as the Titanic and the humour of Ali G. He has additionally published on subjects including party election broadcasts, the ontology of the celebrity photographic image, and the life and work of Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. His books The Myth of the Titanic and Visual Culture are now in their second editions, and a volume on controversies in the arts will be out later this year in collaboration with his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon.

Andrew Hui

• “Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton University Press, 2024), A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton University Press, 2019), and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham University Press, 2017).

Nicholas Humphrey

• Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, he was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” after brain damage in monkeys, he proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect, and he is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta. His many books include Consciousness Regained, A History of the Mind, Leaps of Faith, The Mind Made Flesh and most recently Soul Dust. He has been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf medal and the British Psychological Society’s book award.

Christoph Irmscher

• Audubon’s Haiti

Christoph Irmscher is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University and the George F. Getz Jr. Professor and the Class of 1942 Professor in Indiana University's Wells Scholars Program, which he also directs. His many books include, most recently, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) and Max Eastman: A Life (Yale, 2017). He writes frequently for national publications such as The Wall Street Journal and is also the editor of the Library of America edition of Audubon's Writings and Drawings. Visit his website for more links to recent work.

Roddy Howland Jackson

• Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword

Roddy Howland Jackson graduated from Cambridge in 2021 with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature, where he worked on literary responses to thermodynamics in 19th-century periodicals. He is currently an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine in New York, and sets cryptic crosswords for The Independent and The Oxford Review of Books as Quince. You can find him on Twitter @roddyhj.

Dominic Janes

• A Queer Taste for Macaroni

Dominic Janes is Professor of Modern History at Keele University. He has published a number of books on the arts, gender, and sexuality in Britain since the eighteenth century, including most recently Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900 (UCP, 2016).

Robin Jarvis

• Still Booking on De Quincey’s Mail-Coach

Robin Jarvis is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His many books and articles on Romantic literature include Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Macmillan, 1997), The Romantic Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1789-1830 (Pearson, 2004), and Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel (Ashgate, 2012).

Mike Jay

• Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy
• “O, Excellent Air Bag”: Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide
• Illustrations of Madness: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom
• Brilliant Visions: Peyote among the Aesthetes
• Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland
• The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, and his previous books on the history of drugs include Mescaline, High Society, and The Atmosphere of Heaven.

Nicholas Jeeves

• The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture
• Divine Comedy: Lucian Versus The Gods
• Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books

Nicholas Jeeves is a designer, writer, and lecturer at Cambridge School of Art. He is also designer and editor of Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods, a new edition of Lucian's comic masterpiece out now on PDR Press.

Rebecca Jenkins

• The First Olympic Protest

Rebecca Jenkins is a cultural historian, lecturer, novelist and biographer. She is a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, the Crime Writers’ Association and the Historical Writers’ Association. See contemporary pictures and more about the 1st London Olympics of 1908 at her website

Christine Jones

• Mother Goose’s French Birth (1697) and British Afterlife (1729)
• When Chocolate was Medicine: Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour
• Pods, Pots, and Potions: Putting Cacao to Paper in Early Modern Europe

Christine A. Jones is associate professor of French and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Utah. A specialist of early-modern genres and trades, she is the author of Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France (University of Delaware, 2013) and currently researching the early European print reception of chocolate, coffee, and tea.

Max Jones

• Remembering Scott

Dr Max Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford UP, 2003) and the editor of Journals: Captain Scott's Last Expedition (Oxford World's Classics) (Oxford UP, 2005). Max has been invited to lecture on Scott to audiences in Los Angeles, Milan and Tasmania. He is currently working on a new book on the rise and fall of national heroes over the last 250 years.

Katie Kadue

• Free Speech and Bad Meats: The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica

Katie Kadue is the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She teaches English at SUNY Binghamton.

Mark David Kaufman

• Robert Baden-Powell’s Entomological Intrigues
• Ignorant Armies: Private Snafu Goes to War

Mark David Kaufman received his Ph.D. in English literature from Tufts University. He has published critical essays in Hypermedia Joyce Studies and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Currently, he is at work on a book project, tentatively titled Secret States: Modernism, Espionage, and the Official Secrets Act. For more information, please visit his website: www.markdavidkaufman.com.

Peter Keeling

• Liberal Visions and Boring Machines: The Early History of the Channel Tunnel

Peter Keeling is a historian of UK politics and democracy. He holds a PhD in nineteenth-century British history from the University of Kent. His Linktree can be visited here.

Betsy Golden Kellem

• Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow

Betsy Golden Kellem is a historian and media attorney. A scholar of the unusual, her history writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, Slate, and Narratively. Betsy serves on the board of directors of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, regularly speaks on circus and sideshow, and has taught at Yale University. She blogs at her history site Drinks With Dead People.

Mike Kelly

• The Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson

Mike Kelly is the Head of the Archives & Special Collections in the Frost Library at Amherst College. His research interests range from the history of nineteenth-century publishing to contemporary comic books. You can follow the activities of the Amherst Archives – including ongoing digitization efforts – at consecratedeminence.wordpress.com.

Martin Kemp

• Sex and Science in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora

Martin Kemp is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford. His books include, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale), and The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago). He has published and broadcast extensively on Leonardo da Vinci, including the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci: The marvellous works of nature and man and Leonardo (both Oxford). His Christ to Coke: How image becomes icon (Oxford) looks at eleven representatives of types of icons across a wide range of public imagery. He wriings for Nature have been published as Visualisations and developed in Seen and Unseen (both Oxford), in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. His most recent book is Art in History (Profile Books).

Dane Kennedy

• Forgotten Failures of African Exploration

Dane Kennedy teaches British and British imperial history at George Washington University and serves as director of the National History Center. His books include The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia and, as editor, Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World.

Frank Key

• Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno
• Dog Stories from The Spectator

Frank Key is a writer and broadcaster best known for his self-published short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which has been broadcast weekly on Resonance FM since April 2004.

Sarah King

• Tempest Anderson: Pioneer of Volcano Photography

Sarah King is the curator of geology at the Yorkshire Museum.

Christopher Klein

• John L. Sullivan Fights America

Christopher Klein is the author of Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America's First Sports Hero (2013, Lyons Press). A frequent contributor to History.com and the Boston Globe, he is also the author of Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands (2008) and The Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston (2009). For links to more of his works, please visit his website: www.christopherklein.com.

Ava Kofman

• The Anthropometric Detective and His Racial Clues

Ava Kofman is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Her writing on technology has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, VICE and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter here.

Luuc Kooijmans

• Frederik Ruysch: The Artist of Death

Luuc Kooijmans is a Dutch historian and author of Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch (Brill, 2011). In 2004 he was awarded the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation Humanities Prize for his oeuvre, and in 2008 he received the Great History Prize for Dangerous Knowledge: Insight and Fear in the Days of Jan Swammerdam (Bert Bakker, 2007).

Monique Kornell

• Accuracy and Elegance in Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733)

Monique Kornell (Ph.D. Warburg Institute) is an independent scholar of anatomical illustration and of the study of anatomy by artists. She has written on works from the 16th to the 19th centuries and has previously published on Cheselden’s Osteographia in the catalogue to the exhibition she co-curated, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1996, pp. 190-193.

Jonathan Lamb

• The Implacability of Things
• Scurvy and the Terra Incognita

Jonathan Lamb is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Britain where he is writing a book titled Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery. His most recent books are The Things Things Say, published last year by Princeton University Press, and The Evolution of Sympathy, (Pickering and Chatto, 2009).

Urte Laukaityte

• Mesmerising Science: The Franklin Commission and the Modern Clinical Trial

Urte Laukaityte is a writer and PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main research interests comprise the fields of psychiatry, medical history, and cognitive science but she is generally fascinated by the curiosities of human and animal life.

Natalie Lawrence

• Decoding the Morse: The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses
• Fallen Angels: Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Europe
• Greenland Unicorns and the Magical Alicorn
• “Spontaneous Revolutions”: Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Natalie Lawrence is a writer, researcher, and illustrator living in London. She has a MCantab in natural sciences and PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. She recently published Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence (2022, Bridge Street Press) with Paco Calvo and her book The Nature of the Beast (Orion Books), on the history of monstrous creatures and the imagination, will be out in 2023.

Maria Laurids Lazzarotti

• Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce

Maria Laurids Lazzarotti is an Italian writer studying comparative literature in Berlin. They write about queer pockets of time.

Gideon Leek

• The Man and The Crowd (1928): Photography, Film, and Fate

Gideon Leek is a writer based in Brooklyn. He has contributed essays and reviews to Liberties, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, The Millions, Screen Slate, and Harvard Review.

Thea Applebaum Licht

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Thea Applebaum Licht is a writer and researcher based in Boston, Massachusetts. She studies the history of science as a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program, and holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago. She is the editorial assistant of The Public Domain Review.

Richard Lines

• The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg

Richard Lines is the Secretary of the Swedenborg Society. He is the author of A History of the Swedenborg Society 1810-2010 (2012) and of numerous articles on Swedenborg, his influence on 19th century literature and on early Swedenborgians, including articles published on the Bloomsbury Project website. He has given papers at academic conferences at the universities of Oxford and York, University College London and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. He lives in London.

Jo Livingstone

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Jo Livingstone is a book critic and nonfiction writer in New York.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

• Voltaire and the Buddha

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. This essay is based on his latest book, Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha, published by the University of Chicago Press. The translation of Voltaire’s essay that appears in the volume is by Peter Skilling.

Mary Losure

• Sir Arthur and the Fairies

Mary Losure is the author of The Fairy Ring: Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World (Candlewick, 2012), named Booklist Editors' Choice Best Youth Nonfiction, 2012 and Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron. You can view her website at www.marylosure.com and the book trailer for Wild Boy on YouTube.

Deirdre Loughridge

• Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist whose work focuses on the history of music and technology. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and writes about music and technology at her blog, Spooky & the Metronome. Her forthcoming book, Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow, explores the audiovisual culture that shaped romantic musical thought, and will be published in May 2016 by University of Chicago Press.

Bess Lovejoy

• Julia Pastrana: A “Monster to the Whole World”

Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, which Amazon named one of the best books of 2013. She writes frequently about the darker corners of history, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Smithsonian, Lapham's Quarterly, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

Peter Lovesey

• Conan Doyle’s Olympic Crusade

Peter Lovesey is a novelist, best known as creator of the Victorian cop, ‘Cribb’, and one of Britain’s leading athletics historians, author of The Official Centenary History Of The Amateur Athletic Association (1979). His website: peterlovesey.com.

Jonah Lubin

• Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce

Jonah Lubin is a writer, translator, and student of literature, interested in Yiddish, translation studies, and Digital Humanities. He is building a database of translations into Yiddish.

Marri Lynn

• Vesalius and the Body Metaphor

Marri Lynn holds a BA in History from the University of Victoria, and an MA in the History of Medicine from McGill University.

Patricia Mainardi

• Grandville, Visions, and Dreams
• Of Pears and Kings

Patricia Mainardi is Professor Emeritus in the Doctoral Program in Art History at the City University of New York. She has published numerous books, articles and exhibition catalogues on nineteenth-century art, including Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (Yale University Press, 2017).

Dániel Margócsy

• Elephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

Dániel Margócsy is university lecturer at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and has just published, with Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018). He can be followed at his website or on Twitter @margocsy.

Ruth Martin

• The History of the Ordinary

Ruth Martin joined Falvey's Digital Library Team as an intern in the summer of 2012, where she is learning about the many aspects of running a digital library.

Lizzie Marx

• Picturing Scent: The Tale of a Beached Whale

Lizzie Marx is a History of Art PhD Candidate at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where she explores the visualization of smell and its meanings in seventeenth-century Dutch art. In 2018–2019 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, and she is the Research and Exhibition Assistant of Fleeting – Scents in Colour, an exhibition at the Mauritshuis on smell in seventeenth-century art, and co-author of the exhibition publication.

Melissa McCarthy

• An Archaeology of Surf
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Melissa McCarthy is the author of Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (Sternberg, 2019). You can find out more about her work at sharksillustrated.org.

Easter McCraney

• In Search of the Third Bird: Kenneth Morris and the Three Unusual Arts

Easter McCraney is an affiliate researcher with ESTAR(SER).

Roger McDonald

• In Praise of Halvings: Hidden Histories of Japan Excavated by Dr D. Fenberger

Roger McDonald is a founding member of Arts Initiative Tokyo and Director of The Museum of Cosmic Consciousness at Fenberger House, a small private museum founded in 2013 in the mountains of Nagano prefecture, Japan, where he lives.

Charles McNamara

• In the Image of God: John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book

Charles McNamara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics at Columbia University. His main research traces the history of certainty, both in its ancient origins and in its early modern applications to legal thought. In addition to his work at Columbia, he also teaches in Rome with the Paideia Institute, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting the study and appreciation of the classical humanities. More information can be found at his website: http://charlesmcnamara.com.

Marion Meade

• In Hollywood with Nathanael West

Marion Meade is the author of Lonelyhearts; The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). She has also written biographies of Dorothy Parker, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as two novels about medieval France.

Allison C. Meier

• Illustrating Carnival: Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras
• Photographing the Dark: Nadar’s Descent into the Paris Catacombs
• Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries

Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and researcher. Her book Grave was published last year by Bloomsbury as part of the Object Lessons book series. She is the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine and has bylines in the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Raw Vision Magazine, CityLab, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many other publications. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.

Ben Merriman

• Piracy at the Old Bailey

Ben Merriman is a doctoral candidate in Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and fiction editor at Chicago Review. Ben's essays have appeared in n+1, Threepenny Review, Democracy, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other magazines.

Alison Metcalfe

• The Forth Bridge: Building an Icon

Alison Metcalfe is a curator in the Manuscript and Archive Collections department of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Her varied remit includes archives relating to science and engineering, encompassing collections such as the business archive of the lighthouse-building Stevenson family, the papers of Scottish engineers like John Rennie and Thomas Telford, and of scientists such as Robert Watson-Watt, pioneer of radar technology.

Steven Michels

• American Freedom: Sinclair Lewis and the Open Road

Steven Michels is professor of political science at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT and the author of Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy. Visit his personal website or follow him on Twitter.

Carl Miller

• The Strangely Troubled Life of Digby Mackworth Dolben

Carl Miller is a harmless North American collector of second-rate books. He is currently at work on The Sweetest Taboo, an anthology of purple prose.

Richard Millington

• Wild Heart Turning White: Georg Trakl and Cocaine

Richard Millington teaches German language and literature at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His research interests include literary Expressionism, the association between literature and psychoactive substances, and the literature of late-Habsburg and interwar Austria, all three of which converge in the figure of Georg Trakl. The present article draws on material from his 2012 book Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets. He is currently working on a critical commentary of Trakl's poetry.

Lissa Mitchell

• Autochromes from the Te Papa Collection

Lissa Mitchell is Curator of Historical Documentary Photography at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Her main research areas concern photography made during the colonial period related to New Zealand. Follow Lissa on Twitter @rainyslip.

Rebecca N. Mitchell

• On Oscar Wilde and Plagiarism

Rebecca N. Mitchell is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, England. She was previously Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas–Pan American.

Melina Moe

• Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

Melina Moe holds a PhD in literature from Yale. She writes about literary history and archives, and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Sidecar. She lives in Manhattan.

Eva Moreda Rodríguez

• Inventing the Recording

Eva Moreda Rodríguez is a cultural historian of Spanish music, with research interests spanning from the late 19th century to the present. She is currently a lecturer in Music at the University of Glasgow and the author of Music and Exile in Francoist Spain (Ashgate, 2015) and Music Criticism and Music Critics in Early Francoist Spain (Oxford University Press, 2016). She is also an award-winning novelist in Galician, and her English-language fiction (as Eva Ferry) has been published in journals and anthologies.

Melissa N. Morris

• Filling in the Blanks: A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze

Melissa N. Morris is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. She has a PhD in History from Columbia University, where she wrote a dissertation on how plants mediated relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the seventeenth century Americas. On Twitter here

Iwan Rhys Morus

• Colonizing the Cosmos: Astor’s Electrical Future

Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University. He graduated in Natural Science from Cambridge University in 1985 before going on to complete an MPhil (1986) and PhD (1989) in History and Philosophy of Science there. He has published widely on the history of science, including Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (Icon, 2019) and, most recently How The Victorians Took Us To The Moon (UK, Icon; US, Pegasus Books, forthcoming 2022). He lives in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Sujaan Mukherjee

• W. B. O’Shaughnessy and the Introduction of Cannabis to Modern Western Medicine

Sujaan Mukherjee is a Sylff PhD researcher at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. For his PhD he is looking at the role of urban memory in the formation of Kolkata, although his academic interests include physical cultures, Modernism and feminisms. Between 2015 and 2016 Sujaan was an archival fellow with the India Foundation for the Arts, researching visual representations of Calcutta particularly in tourism documents.

Rob Mullender-Ross

• Picturing a Voice: Margaret Watts Hughes and the Eidophone

Rob Mullender-Ross is an artist, researcher and educator, whose multidisciplinary practice explores sound in its multiple incarnations and interactions across sculpture, performance, installation, moving image and text. His PhD looked at how light and image has been used to create sound, framing this as an alternative history to experimental sound and image production. He is a member of CRISAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) at University of the Arts, London.

Brian Murray

• Henry Morton Stanley and the Pygmies of “Darkest Africa”

Brian H. Murray is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Teaching Fellow in Victorian Literature at King’s College London and facilitator of the international research network Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, 1851-1914. He is currently co-editing a new edition of H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.

Nina Murray

• Walt Whitman in Russia: Three Love Affairs

Nina Murray is author of poetry collections Alcestis in the Underworld, Minor Heresies, and Damascus Electric. Her translations from Russian and Ukrainian include Peter Aleshkovsky’s Stargorod, and Oksana Zabuzhko’s award-winning The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. She grew up in Lviv, in Western Ukraine, and holds advanced degrees in linguistics and creative writing.

Carla Nappi

• The Elizabeths: Elemental Historians

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. She works on the histories of bodies and their translations in early modern China, lately focusing on the use of Manchu as a medium of translation across early modern Eurasia. She is the author of The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009) and a bunch of other things that you can find by browsing around her website. She also hosts two podcasts and writes short fiction.

Victoria Nebolsin

• Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

Victoria Nebolsin is a writer from North Carolina. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, BOMB, and Hyperallergic.

Joseph Nigg

• Olaus Magnus’ Sea Serpent

Since publication of The Book of Gryphons in 1982, Joseph (Joe) Nigg has explored the rich cultural lives of mythical creatures in a variety of styles and formats for readers of all ages. Sea Monsters: The Lore and Legacy of Olaus Magnus’s Marine Map was published in 2013 by Ivy Press in the United Kingdom and as Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map by the University of Chicago Press in the United States.

Michael J. North

• Markham’s Masterpiece
• A Mongolian Manual of Astrology and Divination

Michael J. North is the Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.

Maximillian Novak

• Loos, Lewdness, and Literature: Tales from the Boghouse

Maximillian Novak is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at UCLA. He has taught literature at the university level for close to fifty years and published twelve critical studies and major editions along with hundreds of articles and reviews. He has specialised in the Restoration and eighteenth century, especially the novel and drama of that period. He has also taught and written in the area of Jewish-American fiction.

Kathryn Nuernberger

• Titiba and the Invention of the Unknown

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently RUE (BOA, 2020), as well as the essay collections, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and The Witch of Eye (Sarabande Books, forthcoming in 2021). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, H. J. Andrews Research Forest, she teaches in the creative writing program at University of Minnesota.

Stuart Ogilvy

• Tempest Anderson: Pioneer of Volcano Photography

Stuart Ogilvy is the curator of natural history at the Yorkshire Museum.

Arika Okrent

• Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük

Arika Okrent is a linguist and the author of In the Land of Invented Languages.

John Overholt

• Cabinet Card Photographs from the Harvard Theatre Collection

John Overholt is Curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson and Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Hanna-Leena Paloposki

• Daniel Nyblin’s Glass Negatives of Artworks

Hanna-Leena Paloposki works as the chief curator and archive- and library manager at the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Helsinki.

Aaron Parrett

• Lucian’s Trips to the Moon

Dr. Aaron Parrett is a writer and professor at the University Of Great Falls in Montana. He has published widely in various fields, including History, Science Fiction, Philosophy, and Literature. He is the author of The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition (Ashgate 2004).

Thomas Patteson

• Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

Thomas Patteson is a Philadelphia-based musicologist whose work explores modern music, technology, and the experimental arts. He teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music and is an associate curator for Bowerbird. His first book, Instruments for New Music, will be published in November 2015 by the University of California Press.

J. H. Pearl

• Defoe and the Distance to Utopia

J.H. Pearl is an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. He is book reviews editor at Digital Defoe and author of Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel (2014).

Ned Pennant-Rea

• The Dancing Plague of 1518
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Ned Pennant-Rea is an editor and writer from London. He likes early modern literature and wrote his Master’s thesis on animals in Montaigne’s essays.

Dominic Pettman

• Get Thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade
• Some Remarks on the Legacy of Madame Francine Descartes – First Lady and Historian of the Robocene – on the Occasion of 500 Years Since her Unlawful Watery Execution.

Dominic Pettman is Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of numerous books, including Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More, and Less, Than Human (Minnesota, 2017), Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford, 2017), and — with Carla Nappi — Metagestures (Punctum, 2019).

Robert Poole

• The Lancashire Witches 1612-2012

Robert Poole is the author of The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (Carnegie, £7.95), and the editor of The Lancashire witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester UP, £14.99).

Miriam Posner

• Jacob Sarnoff and the Strange World of Anatomical Filmmaking

Miriam Posner is the Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Ph.D., from Yale University, is in Film Studies and American Studies.

John Potter

• Almost as Good as Presley: Caruso the Pop Idol

John Potter is the author of Tenor: History of a Voice (Yale University Press 2009 & 2010). His latest book, A History of Singing, jointly written with ethnomusicologist Neil Sorrell, is published this month by Cambridge

Christopher Prendergast

• Proust’s Pinks

Christopher Prendergast is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He writes for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. He is also the general editor of the Penguin reissues of Proust’s work, published in 2002.

Claire Preston

• Lost Libraries

Claire Preston is Professor of Early-Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her books include Bee.

George Prochnik

• American Kaleidoscope: Morton Prince and the Boston Revolution in Psychotherapy

George Prochnik is a New York-based writer. His most recent book is In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (Doubleday, 2010). Prior to that, he wrote Putnam Camp: James Jackson Putnam & the Purpose of American Psychology (Other Press, 2006), a New York Times “Editor’s Pick.” A regular contributor to Cabinet magazine, he is currently at work on a book about early 20th Century case histories involving madness, murder, freaks and elephants.

Jo Pugh

• The World According to Pitt

Jo Pugh is a Research Engineer at The National Archives and the University of York funded by the ESPRC. His podcast "How to win a duel" is intended for information only and he cannot be held liable for any defeat or injury suffered by listeners.

Alicia Puglionesi

• Proving it: The American Provers’ Union Documents Certain Ill Effects
• Lofty Only in Sound: Crossed Wires and Community in 19th-Century Dreams
• “Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James

Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian. She holds a PhD in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (2020), explores how the practices of seances, clairvoyance, and telepathy both questioned and reinscribed social boundaries. Her second book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire (2022), examines four sites of resource extraction that also yielded scientific and spiritual narratives core to US settler-colonialism. Her essays from various corners of the web can be found here.

Philip Pullman

• The Sound and the Story: Exploring the World of Paradise Lost

The Lord of Dust, creator of daemons and spinner of the finest fairy tales, Philip Pullman is one of the world’s greatest and most influential storytellers. His wide-ranging body of work encompasses books for both adults and children, but he is best-known for the unparalleled achievement that is His Dark Materials and the eagerly awaited sequel, La Belle Sauvage, the first volume in Pullman's new series The Book of Dust. Published by Penguin Random and David Fickling Books in October 2017, La Belle Sauvage has since been named Waterstone's Book of the Year. The second book in the series, The Secret Commonwealth, published October 2019.

Anca Pusca

• On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

Anca Pusca is Senior Lecturer in International Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change and other articles on Benjamin which have appeared in Alternatives, International Political Sociology, Perspectives and the Journal of International Research and Development.

Lydia Pyne

• Neanderthals in 3D: L’Homme de La Chapelle
• Yvette Borup Andrews: Photographing Central Asia

Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian of science, interested in the history of paleoanthropology, archaeology, museums, collections, and material culture. Her fieldwork, archival research, and writing projects have ranged from South Africa, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, and Iran, as well as the American Southwest. She is the co-author of The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene and is currently writing Famous Fossils, Hidden Histories and Bookshelf. @LydiaPyne / http://pynecone.org

Sheila Rabun

• Historic Oregon Newspapers: Preserving History While Shaping the Future

Sheila Rabun is the Digital Project Manager at the University of Oregon (UO) Libraries' Digital Scholarship Center (DSC), currently serving as the Interim Director of the DSC. Her work in the DSC involves collaborations with faculty and students from various departments across campus to create interactive websites and digital projects related to the Libraries' digital collections, in addition to managing the UO Libraries’ digital collections at Oregon Digital and the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program.

Carmel Raz

• Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics

Carmel Raz is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, where she leads a group entitled “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body”. Her primary research interests focus on the music and neural science of the early Romantic period, in particular the influence of different theories of cognition on musical works, instrument design, and aesthetics. She is also interested in eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy, historical theories of attention, and role of musical performance in philosophical conceptions of automatism.

Rebecca Rego Barry

• Flower Power: Hamilton’s Doctor and the Healing Power of Nature

Rebecca Rego Barry writes about history, literature, and culture for several publications and is the author of Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places (Voyageur Press, 2015).

Edward Rielly

• Geronimo: The Warrior

Edward Rielly is a professor of English at Saint Joseph¹s College of Maine. He has published about two dozen books, including several volumes of his own poetry. His nonfiction works include Sitting Bull: A Biography (Greenwood, 2007) and Legends of American Indian Resistance (ABC-CLIO, 2011). The latter includes a chapter on Geronimo.

Jessica Riskin

• Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence
• “You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. Her teaching, research and writing focus on the history of modern science, ideas, culture and politics. She is the author most recently of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Thing Tick and is currently writing a book about Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who coined the term “biology” around 1800 and developed the first theory of evolution.

Jessica Roberson

• Pens and Needles: Reviving Book-Embroidery in Victorian England

Jessica Roberson is an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow with the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She writes and publishes on poetry, book history, and literary material culture in the long 19th century, on topics ranging from Houdini’s marginalia to souvenirs taken from poet’s graves. She is currently working on a book that examines the impact of Romantic science and literature on representations of media life cycles and the intellectual history of "the death of the book".

Ian Campbell Ross

• “Alas, Poor YORICK!”: The Death and Life of Laurence Sterne

Ian Campbell Ross is author of Laurence Sterne: a life (OUP, 2001) and has edited Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1983; new ed. OUP, 2009). Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin, his travel writing includes Umbria: A Cultural Guide (1996; rev. ed. Signal, 2013). He is also General Editor for Four Courts Press' Early Irish Fiction, c.1680–1820 series.

Dr. Esther Ruelfs

• Sharing Photographs

Dr. Esther Ruelfs has been Head of the Photography and New Media Department since 2012. Her interest lies in the connection between historical currents and recent developments in photography. She wrote her thesis on the German photographer Herbert List.

Paloma Ruiz

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Niki Russell

• Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits

Niki Russell is Chief Library Assistant at Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library. She blogs on her work with rare books and manuscripts: see the Special Collections website.

Sharon Ruston

• The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University. She has published Creating Romanticism (2013), Shelley and Vitality (2005), Romanticism: An Introduction (2007), and has edited Literature and Science (2008) and co-edited with David Higgins Teaching Romanticism (2010). She is currently co-editing the Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy.

Koto Sadamura

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Dr Koto Sadamura specialises in Japanese art of the late 19th century. She has curated exhibitions and published extensively on the artist Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), including Kawanabe Kyōsai no chōsen: Kyōga de hiraita shinjidai (Kawanabe Kyōsai's Endeavour: Exploring a New Era through Comic Pictures; University of Tokyo Press, 2023), Kyōsai: The Israel Goldman Collection (Royal Academy of Arts, 2022), Kyōsai’s Animal Circus: From the Israel Goldman Collection (Royal Academy of Arts, 2022) and Sex and Laughter with Kyōsai: Shunga from the Israel Goldman Collection (co-authored, Seigensha, 2017). She is the curator of the Israel Goldman Collection, London, and a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Asia, the British Museum.

Peter Sahlins

• Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of five books including Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (1989) and Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in Old Regime France and After (2004). He currently lives in Paris where he is researching a book on Neanderthal culture and consults for museums and non-profits.

Daisy Sainsbury

• Displaying the Dead: The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue
• Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective
• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Daisy Sainsbury is a British writer and translator based in Paris. She completed a PhD and post-doctoral research fellowship in French literature at the University of Oxford and is the author of Contemporary French Poetry (Legenda, 2021). She has written short stories, reviews and essays for publications such as Literary Review, ArtReview, Wasafiri, 3:AM Magazine and The London Magazine, and is currently working on her first novel.

Dr. Antje Schmidt

• Sharing Photographs

Dr. Antje Schmidt is Head of Digital Cataloguing and MKG Collection Online. She holds a doctorate in Art History and, while her doctoral thesis examined the changing architecture and presentation modes of museums around 1900, in her current position she explores the challenges of museum practice in the digital age. You can contact her via Twitter.

Peter Schmidt

• The Encyclopedia of Light

Peter Schmidt is a writer, researcher and founding member of the Global Experimental Historiography Collective. His novel, A Mountain There, is forthcoming. He lives in New York City.

Rachel Schmidt

• Picturing Don Quixote

Rachel Schmidt is a professor at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (McGill-Queen’s 1999) and Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel (Toronto 2011). She is currently working on a book about cosmology and politics in Cervantes’ last novel, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda.

Susan Schulten

• Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

Susan Schulten is Professor of History at the University of Denver, and the author of A History of America in 100 Maps, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950. She uses old maps to tell new stories about history, and her research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Vaughn Scribner

• Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason

Vaughn Scribner is associate professor of British American history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (2019) and Merpeople: A Human History (2020). He is currently at work on his third book — Under Alien Skies: The Climate of War in Revolutionary America — which will be the first monograph-length environmental history of the American Revolution.

Yasmine Seale

• Out of Their Love They Made It: A Visual History of Buraq

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. She is reading for a PhD on Ottoman attitudes to antiquity at St John's College, Oxford.

Yvonne Seale

• George Washington: A Descendant of Odin?

Yvonne Seale is a historian of medieval women, religion, and gender and an Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo. She can be found on Twitter at @yvonneseale.

Irfan Shah

• Sensitive Material: Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures

Irfan Shah is a writer and researcher specialising in pre-cinema media archaeology. He is an Associate of Leeds Beckett University where he helped establish the Stephen Herbert Archive of motion picture research, and has written documentaries and articles on different aspects of early film.

Ed Simon

• Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth
• Robert Greene, the First Bohemian
• Defining the Demonic
• Divining the Witch of York: Propaganda and Prophecy
• Lord of Misrule: Thomas Morton’s American Subversions

Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site”. A specialist in early modern and early American literature, he holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and his most recent book is Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism (Zero Books, 2020).

Katie Sisneros

• Early Modern Memes: The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print

Katie Sisneros is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow working as Content Analyst at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She earned her PhD in English Literature from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she studied representations of Muslims in seventeenth century English broadside ballads and other popular literature. See her on Twitter here.

Thom Sliwowski

• Windows Onto History: The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)

Thom Sliwowski holds a PhD in comparative literature and critical theory from UC Berkeley. He writes about history, Eastern Europe, and the body, and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in Sidecar. He lives in Berlin.

Justin E. H. Smith

• The Primordial Gound

Justin E. H. Smith is a philosopher and he lives in Paris.

Federica Soletta

• Porch Memories

Federica Soletta is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Architecture and a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. Her research focuses on architectural historiography in mid-19th-century England and its intersections with early photography and natural science.

Vlad Solomon

• Laughter in the Time of Cholera
• Talking Lightly About Serious Things: Henri Rochefort and the Origins of French Populism

Vlad Solomon is an independent scholar based in Montreal with a PhD in history from McGill University. His most recent book is State Surveillance, Political Politicing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914. Currently, he is working on a biography of the French radical journalist and political activist Henri Rochefort, provisionally titled Bitter Farce: The Spectacular Life and Times of Henri Rochefort.

W.A. Speck

• Robert Southey’s Dreams Revisited

W. A. Speck is author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (Yale University Press, 2006) and 'His nights amont the dead were passed: Robert Southey's dreams' in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism edited by Lynda Pratt (Ashgate, 2006).

Martin Spevack

• The Curious World of Isaac D’Israeli

Marvin Spevack held a chair of English Philology at the University of Muenster. After producing essential works on Shakespeare - concordances, editions, and a thesaurus - he turned to literary figures of the nineteenth century with books on James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Isaac D'israeli, Sidney Lee, and most recently Francis Turner Palgrave.

Andrew Spira

• Precedents of the Unprecedented: Black Squares Before Malevich

Born in London, Andrew Spira graduated from the Courtauld Institute, before working at the Temple Gallery (specialists in Byzantine, Russian and Greek icons) where he developed a passion for Russian art. For several years, he was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, focusing on the metalwork collections and the British Galleries. He subsequently joined Christie’s Education where he was a Programme Director for fourteen years. Throughout this time he has been writing, teaching, curating and leading tours to cultural sites all over Europe, as well as to Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. He has published several books: The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Lund Humphries, 2008); The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (Bloomsbury, 2020); Simulated Selves: The Undoing of Personal Identity in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Foreshadowed: Malevich’s Black Square and its Precursors (Reaktion, 2022). His website: www.andrewspira.com.

Ian Stewart

• Aspiring to a Higher Plane

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and the author of numerous popular mathematics books, including Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland. His most recent book is Mathematics of Life.

Susan Stewart

• A Paper Archaeology: Piranesi’s Ruinous Fantasias

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. Stewart's newest book of criticism is The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. Her other recent books of prose include The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Her most recent books of poetry are Cinder: New and Selected Poems, Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005–2011. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and in the Spring of 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ellen J. Stockstill

• Rescuing England: The Rhetoric of Imperialism and the Salvation Army

Ellen J. Stockstill is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Harrisburg where she teaches courses on British literature, critical theory, and composition. Her scholarship focuses on Victorian literature and culture, and she is co-author of the forthcoming A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English (Rowman and Littlefield). Recent publications include essays in Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture (Routledge).

Daniel Stolzenberg

• Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx

Daniel Stolzenberg is the author of Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, 2013), on which this article is based. He teaches history at the University of California, Davis.

Will Stone

• Encounter at the Crossroads of Europe - the Fellowship of Zweig and Verhaeren

Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator who currently divides his time between Belgium and Suffolk. His poetry collections have won the international Glen Dimplex Award (2008) and the 3am Magazine poetry book of the year award (2011). His published translations include To The Silenced - selected poems of Georg Trakl (Arc Publications, 2005) and Journeys a collection of Stefan Zweig’s European travel essays, (Hesperus Press, 2010). His first English translation of Rilke in Paris by Maurice Betz appeared from Hesperus Press in June 2012. In spring 2013, Hesperus published two more translations, Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig and On the end of the World, Joseph Roth’s essays from his Parisian exile during the 1930’s. In December 2013 Arc Publications will publish his translation of Emile Verhaeren Poems, the first collection of Verhaeren’s work in English in almost a century.

Andrew McConnell Stott

• The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi
• The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire

Andrew McConnell Stott is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005; 2nd edn, 2014) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction and was named as one of the Guardian's "Books of the Year" for 2010. In 2013 he published The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature's Greatest Monsters (Canongate/Pegasus 2013), which was a best book pick of 2013 for both The Big Issue and The Sunday Times.

Anna Della Subin

• Collections posts as Contributing Editor ➤

Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood, thirteenth-century oculists, occultists, cricket, ritualised mutiny, Dr. Death’s childhood, dreams of 9/11, the politics of the afterlife, 300-year naps. Accidental Gods, a history of men inadvertently turned into deities, is out now from Metropolitan Books in the US and Granta in the UK.

Kelly Sullivan

• Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass

Kelly Sullivan is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Irish Studies at New York University. She writes about British and Irish literature of the 1930s and 1940s, and also publishes poetry and fiction. You can find more information on her website: KellyESullivan.com

Emma Sutton

• Simple Songs: Virginia Woolf and Music

Emma Sutton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. She has published and broadcast widely on music, fine art and literature and her books include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (2002), Opera and the Novel (with Michael Downes, 2012) and Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (2013). She is editing Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, for Cambridge University Press and writing a book on Leonard Woolf.

Urszula Szulakowska

• Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine

Urszula Szulakowska has been a lecturer in the History of Art at Sydney University, Queensland University, Bretton Hall College and the University of Leeds (1977-2011). Currently she is Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She has published extensively on the history of art and alchemy including monographs: The Alchemy of Light (Brill: 2000), The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom (Brill: 2005) and Alchemy in Contemporary Art (Ashgate: 2010), as well as many learned articles and papers in scholarly sources.

Alex Tadel

• Reading Like a Roman: Vergilius Vaticanus and the Puzzle of Ancient Book Culture

Alex Tadel is a recent graduate from a Master’s in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Stationed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, she is taking a short break from academia and working as a freelance writer, researcher and tutor.

Eigil zu Tage-Ravn

• Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI

Eigil zu Tage-Ravn is an independent scholar and collector. For many years he served as the keeper of a distinguished private library in Copenhagen, where he also ran a small contemporary gallery. He has contributed essays and criticism to various publications, including Cabinet (Brooklyn and Berlin) and Parkett (Zurich). He chaired the ESTAR(SER) “Committee on Publications” from 2006–2015, and has a chapter in the recent In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021 (London: Strange Attractor, 2021), edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen, and Justin E. H. Smith. Presently retired, he lives on a houseboat in the Netherlands with his wife, Lucienne, and their Broholmer, Søpapegøje.

Kirsten Tambling

• Gottfried Mind, The Raphael of Cats

Kirsten Tambling completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, on the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth and now writes and lectures on eighteenth-century art, the history of collections, and the intersection of art and psychiatry. In 2018, she was co-curator of the exhibition “James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius at Watts Gallery”. She lives in London.

Gregory Tate

• The Poetry of Victorian Science

Gregory Tate is a Lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of St Andrews. His first book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870, published in 2012, examines the ways in which Victorian poets both responded and contributed to the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline in nineteenth-century Britain. He has just completed his second book, Poetical Matter, which studies the exchange of methods, concepts, and language between poetry and the physical sciences in the nineteenth century.

Frederika Tevebring

• Images from the Collective Unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive

Frederika Tevebring is an intellectual historian interested in the ways that prehistory and antiquity have inspired artists and political thinkers. The research on Eranos is part of a larger project about how the theory of ancient matriarchies became a central idea for socialists, fascists, and feminists in the first decades of the twentieth century. She is a Lecturer in Global Cultures and Interdisciplinary Education in the department of Liberal Arts, King’s College London and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University and a MA and BA in Religious Studies from the Freie Universität in Berlin. She has been the guest editor for a special issue on “Freud’s Archaeology” for American Imago.

Eugene Thacker

• Black on Black

Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011). He teaches at The New School in New York.

David Tibet

• Eric, Count Stenbock: A Catch Of A Ghost

David Tibet is founder of Current 93, everyone’s favourite Hallucinatory Cuneiform SuperGroup. He has specialised in publishing Count Stenbock's work for many years, and Of Kings And Things, published by Strange Attractor, is the first mass-market edition that he has presented of Stenbock's work. His main interests are in translating Coptic and Akkadian texts, stroking his cats, and taking photographs of ghosts. Current 93's new album, The Light Is Leaving Us All, is released in October. A major exhibition of his paintings opens at The Begovich Gallery in LA in March 2019. His website is www.DavidTibet.com

Miya Tokumitsu

• Cliché-Verre and Friendship in 19th-Century France

Miya Tokumitsu is the Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University. She completed her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Her writing encompasses art historical scholarship and cultural criticism.

John Toohey

• The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram

John Toohey is a PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, specializing in landscape and vernacular photography. He has two books published, Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare (Duffy & Snellgrove, 4th Estate, Harper Collins) and Quiros (Duffy & Snellgrove) both concerned with early exploration of the Pacific.

Sarah Toulouse

• The Other Lives of Adam and Eve

Sarah Toulouse has been Head of the Rare Books and Cultural Heritage Department at Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole since 1995.

Peter Tracy

• Luigi Russolo’s Cacophonous Futures

Peter Tracy is a writer, cellist, and composer. His writing has appeared in Clef Notes, Second Inversion, and VAN, as well as in his online newsletter, Everyone and I. Currently based in Seattle, he splits his time between writing, teaching, and making music with friends. His work in all mediums can be found on his website.

Laura Tradii

• Petrified Waters: The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond

Dr Laura Tradii is a social anthropologist and historian with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She specialises in the cultural history of war, with a focus on the practices and debates surrounding the management of fallen soldiers. She has featured in the National Geographic in 2019, and she is currently a researcher in the LSE/Wellcome Trust project Human Rights – Human Remains. Since her MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Oxford, she has cultivated an interest in cultural narratives about technology, and in the intersections between art and science in Renaissance material culture and gardens. Her articles on these topics have appeared in Dilettante Army.

John Tresch

• Still Farther South: Poe and Pym’s Suggestive Symmetries
• Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves

John Tresch is Professor and Mellon Chair in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute. His books include The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, which won the 2013 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (2021), and Cosmograms: How to Do Things with Worlds (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press).

Nicholas Tromans

• Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke

Nicholas Tromans teaches at Kingston University, London. He curated the Tate Britain exhibition "The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting" in 2008 and his book on Richard Dadd, The Artist and the Asylum, was published last year. He recommends to PDR readers this blog about the history of psychiatry - maintained by Bethlem Hospital.

Angus Trumble

• “O Uommibatto”: How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

Angus Trumble is a former Director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Previously he was Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and, before that, Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

Dr. Sandra Tuppen

• Music Manuscripts from the 17th and 18th Centuries in the British Library

Dr. Sandra Tuppen is Curator of Music Manuscripts at the British Library.

Heather Tweed

• Mrs Giacometti Prodgers, the Cabman’s Nemesis

Heather Tweed is a multimedia artist and educator based in the UK. She has exhibited pieces widely throughout the UK as well as in New York, Tokyo and the Library Of Congress in Washington. She has worked with organizations including The British Council Cairo, Bristol City Council and Arts & Business. The ever expanding installation 'Anubis Other World Tour' has been visiting art galleries, caves and other interesting venues scaring, delighting and perplexing in equal measure since 1997. Her website: www.heathertweed.co.uk

Angela Vanhaelen

• Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam

Angela Vanhaelen is professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her books include The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths (2022) and The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (2012), winner of the 2013 Bainton Prize.

Erika Vause

• The Art of Making Debts: Accounting for an Obsession in 19th-Century France

Erika Vause is assistant professor of history at St. John’s University. She specialises in the social and cultural history of law and economics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Her first book, In the Red and in the Black: Debt, Dishonor, and the Law in France Between Revolutions (University of Virginia Press, 2018), examines the development of debt imprisonment and bankruptcy as a means of understanding the changing relationship between the economic and penal realms.

Demetra Vogiatzaki

• Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams

Demetra Vogiatzaki is a historian of eighteenth-century architecture and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, where she works on the intersection of virtual and material spaces in early modern Europe. Her dissertation “On Marvels and Stones: Dreams, Virtuality, and Space in Late Eighteenth-Century France”, partly conducted in collaboration with the French literature department at Sorbonne, presents dreaming as an integral and indispensable component of eighteenth century socio-political processes. For her research, Demetra has received generous support from Harvard, UCLA, the French Embassy in the United States, and the Canadian Center of Architecture. Her broader interests include the politics of early modern imagination, eighteenth-century environmentalism, and Eastern Mediterranean diplomatic mediations in the Enlightenment.

Edward Wakeling

• Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark

Edward Wakeling is a long-standing member of the Lewis Carroll Society. He has written widely on Carroll over the last three decades, and among his publications is the first unabridged edition of Lewis Carroll’s Diaries in 10 volumes. He has written on Carroll’s photography, letters, mathematics, puzzles and games, and logic. As a recognised Carrollian scholar and collector, he is frequently called upon to contribute to conferences, exhibitions, and television programmes around the world. His website is www.lewiscarroll-site.com

Peter W. Walker

• Little Boney: James Gillray and Napoleon’s Fragile Masculinity

Peter W. Walker is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. He is working on a book titled The Power of Suffering: Loyalism, the Church of England, and the American Revolution. He holds a doctorate from Columbia University.

Dr. Elycia Wallis

• The Quirky, the Artful, and the Unexpected: Historic Photographs of Life in Australia

Dr Elycia Wallis is the Manager of Online Collections at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. In this role, she is responsible for making the collections publicly available through websites, aggregators, apps or any other digital means. She has a PhD in Zoology and a Masters in Knowledge Management. She is also the current Chair of the Global Coordinating Committee of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Abigail Walthausen

• Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance: Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction
• Tribal Life in Old Lyme: Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile

Abigail Walthausen is a writer and high school English teacher. She writes about technology and teaching the humanities at Edtech Pentameter.

Marina Warner

• Travelling Tales: Kalīlah wa-Dimnah and the Animal Fable

Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011). She has published five novels, including The Lost Father (1988), Indigo (1992), and The Leto Bundle (2001), three collections of short stories and essays on literature and art. Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) evokes her childhood in Egypt. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and since 2016, has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Sicily. She is Distinguished Fellow of All Souls Oxford and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. Her current book explores the concept of Sanctuary.

Jenny Watson

• Selma Lagerlöf: Surface and Depth

Jenny Watson is the associate dean of the Humanities and an associate professor of German and Scandinavian Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her Masters and PhD at the Univeristy of Illinois/ Champaign-Urbana, with a double concentration in German and Scandinavian literature. She is author of the book, Selma Lagerlöf och Tyskland (Selma Lagerlof and Germany), published by the Lagerlöf society, as well as numerous articles and presentations about Lagerlöf. Her present research project is an English-language biography of Selma Lagerlöf.

Laurel Waycott

• Propagating Propaganda: Franklin Barrett’s Red, White, and Blue Liberty Bond Carp

Laurel Waycott holds a PhD in history of science and medicine from Yale University. She lives and works in San Francisco. You can read more of her work on fish and feelings in Winterthur Portfolio.

Caroline Wazer

• The Eternal Guffaw: John Leech and The Comic History of Rome

Caroline Wazer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the concept of public health in imperial Rome, from religious ritual to sewer maintenance. She also writes about the use of ancient Rome as an aspirational model for urban life in the Victorian world. For more, visit www.carolinewazer.com.

Monique Webber

• Who Says Michelangelo Was Right? Conflicting Visions of the Past in Early Modern Prints

Monique Webber is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on the interaction of memory and visual culture in public space, and its impact upon the urban experience.

Simon Werrett

• Picturing Pyrotechnics

Simon Werrett teaches the history of science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Before joining UCL he was an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Samantha Wesner

• The Revolutionary Colossus

Samantha Wesner is a graduate student in history at Cornell and currently a visiting researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where she is at work on a dissertation on electrical vitalism and revolutionary political energy. You can find her on Twitter @sswesner.

Jonathan Westaway

• The Orkney Finnmen Legends: From Early Modern Science to Modern Myth

Dr. Jonathan Westaway is a Senior Research Fellow in History in the School of Humanities, Languages and Global Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers and the Royal Asiatic Society. His research focuses on imperial cultures of exploration in both polar and mountain environments. Current research projects include work on indigenous diasporic identities within the circumpolar Arctic, in particular the abduction, forced relocation and exile of Inuit individuals, groups and communities from North America and Greenland and its cultural impact on the wider Atlantic world.

Jeff Wheelwright

• The Skeptical Pilgrim: Melville’s Clarel

Jeff Wheelwright is a freelance journalist, the former science editor of Life magazine, and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Degrees of Disaster (Simon & Schuster, 1994), The Irritable Heart (W. W. Norton, 2001), and most recently The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess (W. W. Norton, 2012). His fourth book will look at the the strip of the Holy Land between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

Rebecca Whiteley

• Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe

Rebecca Whiteley is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She works on the intersections between visual and material culture, medical history, and social history. She has published on various aspects of the visual culture of pregnancy and childbirth in early modern Europe, including in her monograph Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body. More recently, her research has focussed on the nineteenth century, the material culture of obstetric education, and the entanglements of medicine and sex.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford

• The Last Great Explorer: William F. Warren and the Search for Eden

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press), just out in paperback. She writes about religion and culture for the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Lapham's Quarterly, and Killing the Buddha, where she is an editor.

John Williams

• Beatus of Liébana

John Williams (B.A. Yale, PH.D University of Michigan) taught twelve years at Swarthmore College, retired as Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh. He is Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and author of The Illustrated Beatus, 5 vols, London, (1994-2003).

Seán Williams

• Little Switzerlands: Alpine Kitsch in England
• Rambling Reflections: On Summers in Switzerland and Sheffield

Seán Williams is Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield, and writes and broadcasts on German and comparative cultural history. His first book, Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy, concerns print culture around 1800. He is currently writing a cultural and media history of the hairdresser. A version of “Little Switzerlands” can be heard on BBC Radio 3.

Jé Wilson

• Lustucru: From Severed Heads to Ready-Made Meals
• Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature

Jé Wilson is a writer who lives in New York. @jewilsn

Sonia Wilson

• “I Am My Own Heroine”: How Marie Bashkirtseff Rewrote the Route to Fame

Sonia Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Personal Effects: Reading the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (Legenda MHA/Maney, 2010; Routledge, 2017), from parts of which this essay is loosely adapted.

Alison Wishart

• Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens

Alison Wishart has worked as a curator and/or collection manager since 2003 at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville and the State Library of Queensland (Brisbane) before moving to Canberra in 2008 to work at the National Museum of Australia and now the Australian War Memorial where she holds the position of Senior Curator of Photographs. She has a BA (Hons) from the University of Queensland and a Masters in Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage. Alison is currently researching the psychological, social and physical impacts of food at Gallipoli and online memorialisation.

Winnie Wong

• Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries

Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood

• Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816

Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Ballarat, Australia, and received his Ph.D from Columbia University in 2000. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of two books on British Romanticism: The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001) and Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1780-1840 (Cambridge 2010). His new work, in its “eco-historical” mode, performs Romantic-styled archaeology across spatial and temporal scales, and between disciplines from literary history to the Earth and atmospheric sciences. His recently published book, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton 2014), reconstructs on a global scale the destructive climate deterioration arising from the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. Tambora has received broad recognition—including from The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Nature, and the London Review of Books — and was included in Book of the Year awards by the Guardian newspaper and the London Times.

Jenny Woolf

• The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

Jenny Woolf is the author of Charles L. Dodgson’s biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

Lucy Worsley

• Peter The Wild Boy

Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at the charity Historic Royal Palaces, which opens the unoccupied royal palaces of London including The Tower of London, Hampton Court and Kensington Palace to 3.2 million visitors a year. Her book Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court was published by Faber and Faber in 2011. She has also presented a BBC television series on the topic of her new book If Walls Could Talk, An Intimate History of the Home (Walker Books, 2012). Please visit her website.

Rangsook Yoon

• Navigating Dürer’s Woodcuts for The Ship of Fools

Rangsook Yoon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Central College in Pella, Iowa, specialising in Dürer’s early career as a print-maker and self-publisher. She is currently working on several articles dealing with Dürer’s woodcuts during his apprenticeship and journeyman years, as well as a book about the Apocalypse.

Michael W. Young

• Writing his Life through the Other: The Anthropology of Malinowski

Michael Young, an anthropologist trained by students of Malinowski at the Universities of London and Cambridge, has done fieldwork in eastern Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. As well as his works on Malinowski, he is the author of several anthropological monographs. He is currently a Research Associate in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

Jack Zipes

• The Forgotten Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer of scholarship on fairy tales. He has published prolifically in this area. His many works include: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983); The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988); and most recently The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (2012). He is also translator of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm .

Harry van Biessum

• Strange Contests in the Netherlands

Harry van Biessum holds a master degree in media studies (Utrecht University) and works for the Research and Development department at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The main mission of the projects he works for centres around opening up digital cultural heritage, via Open Images (open video), Europeana Sounds (sound related objects in Europe), the Amateur Film Platform (Dutch non-profit films and home movies) and Digitale Collectie (the Dutch dark aggregator for digital cultural heritage objects). Furthermore he is supporter of the Long Now Foundation, an initiative that is trying to make long-term thinking more common, which can be considered as an important step for a sustainable future.

Marieke van Delft

• The Writings of J.F. Martinet (1729-1795)

Marieke van Delft is curator of Early Printed editions at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands. She publishes about the history of the book in the Netherlands in different ages as well as digital research methods in the field. She is coordinator of Bibliopolis, Watermarks in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries, Early Dutch Books Online and the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands.

Michiel van Groesen

• 1592: Coining Columbus

Michiel van Groesen is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Amsterdam, where he specializes in early modern Atlantic history and the history of news. He is the author of The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages, 1590-1634 (Brill 2008; pbk 2012), and editor of the forthcoming volume The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge UP). In 2013, he was the Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York.

John van Wyhe

• Was Charles Darwin an Atheist?

John van Wyhe is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. He has published four books on Darwin, including the illustrated biography: Darwin (Andre Deutsch 2008). He is also founder and director of Darwin Online.

Bert van de Roemer

• Redressing the Balance: Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature

Bert (G.M.) van de Roemer is assistant professor Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in early modern collections, museology, art theory and the history of Amsterdam. He has published on the collections Frederik Ruysch and Simon Schijnvoet and is preparing a book about Dutch collections of curiosities from the early eighteenth century. See here for more info.