Staff profile

Contact

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

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

Social Media: X (Twitter) and Bluesky

Areas of Expertise

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

Profile

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

Research

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

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

Current Projects

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

At the moment I am coordinating four international projects. The first is an AHRC-funded collaborative project with Keith Moore of the Royal Society of London.  Titled Astronomical Notebooks and the Material Culture of Predigital Communication Systems, it funds a PhD student and investigates the paper technologies used by the astronomer Caroline Herschel during the late Georgian era.  The second project, Scientific Instructions and Colonialism, is a collaboration with Linda Burnett Anderson and Maria Floritau, both based at Uppsala University, Sweden.  It investigates how seemingly simple lists of instructions issued by colonial institutions during the 18th and 19th centuries shaped the values of scientists as they collected data at home and across the globe.  The third project, The Enlightened Diarist, is a collaboration with Jane Rendall and Rachel Feldberg, both based at York University's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.  It focuses on the daily interactions between science, the arts and sociability in the city of York as experienced by the provincial diarist Jane Ewbank. The fourth project, Science and Protestantism in Eastern Europe, is a collaboration with Ábrahám Kovács, based at János Selye University, Slovakia.  It examines how reformed and congregational churches in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire engaged with the natural sciences from the 17th to mid 20th centuries.  

Awards and Honours

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