Staff profile

Odile Lehnen is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. She is writing a thesis entitled “Celestial Machines: Caroline Herschel, Astronomical Notebooks and the Material Culture of Predigital Communication Systems”. She holds an AHRC collaborative doctoral award and her project is partnered with the Royal Society in London, where a rich collection of Herschel manuscripts has been preserved. In her work she offers a new perspective on Caroline Herschel’s scientific achievements by focusing on Herschel’s use of notebooks and other paper tools for the accumulation and production of astronomical knowledge. This emphasis underscores Caroline Herschel’s agency as a collaborator of her brother, William Herschel, and as an observer in her own right. Odile received an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Science and Society from University College London. She also has a passion for audio-visual research communication – an interest which she explored as a delegate of the TvPhD scheme, through which she had the opportunity of pitching a documentary programme based on her PhD research at the 2023 Edinburgh TV Festival.

• Visual and Material Culture of Science
• History of Astronomy
• History of Information
• Science and Gender
• Science and Technology Studies