Contesting Earth’s History
April 3, 2025
This is a GUEST POST by Richard Fallon, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. Richard has studied interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century and paying particular attention to the literary popularisation of dinosaurs. His current work examines transatlantic geoscience between the 1860s and the 1920s characterised by …
Fin-de-Siècle Youth Magazines and their Construction of Gendered Responses to Sickness
March 14, 2025
This is a post by SUSAN SUDBURY. Susan is a fifth-year honours student completing a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she is studying an extended major in English Literature. I am here reposting with permission a blog post that she wrote as part of the Media and Epidemics project. …
Gnomes, ichthyosaurs and 19th-century science communication
January 14, 2022
Last weekend I had an interaction on Twitter that got me away from doomscrolling and transported me back to my safe place, namely the 19th century. In my past life, when I was very young, I wrote a Staatsexamensarbeit, a sort of MA for people on the teacher training track (I never went to the …
Making science popular: Science communication in 19th-century France
August 20, 2017
Some weeks ago I saw a tweet in my timeline which contained an engraving of an iguanodon skeleton. The skeleton had been exhibited in Brussels and its picture appeared in the 1883* issue of the French popular science magazine La Science Illustrée. This made me think of an old blog post of mine entitled “Making Science Picturesque”, where …