Newsroom

America’s relationship to science is fraught with turmoil. Images of science have long held an ambiguous place in our collective psyche: from Frankenstein’s monster to the moon landing, people have characterized it in both nefarious and glowing terms. Our...

I wrote Inscriptions of Nature because I felt the need to write a political history of deep time, geohistory, and nature. Deep history, that is the history of the evolution of the earth, is often represented as a purely natural phenomenon; of movements of...

Part of the #RaiseUP 2020 University Press Week Blog Tour: Scientific Voices. That women in science must confront disproportionately significant obstacles to succeed is old news – thousands of years old. Gatekeepers (sometimes self-appointed) of scientific...

It is hard to distil any work and its implications to an essence. But, often, we have to: time may be pressing; audiences (and funders) need convincing—and sometimes quickly. One common feature of graduate training in UK universities in recent years, for...

It was fencing that led me to my interest in the history and philosophy of timekeeping. Forget what you think you know about fencing—what you’ve seen in TV shows and movies and such. The reality is both less visually exciting and intellectually more engaging...

The First Edition of Vertebrate Biology was published in 1998; the Second Edition in 2012. Since that time, many taxonomic changes and revisions have occurred, many new paleontological discoveries have enabled us to better comprehend the evolutionary origins...

Imagine uncovering the bones of once-living animals that are millions of years old that no one has seen before, or leading an expedition to the Gobi Desert to search for dinosaurs. These are just a few of the thrilling adventures of women scientists, aka...

In William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s understanding of history forcefully applies to the story of Maryland during the Civil War. If we had forgotten his point, the recent controversy over the future...

Although “Franken” has in the cultural zeitgeist become a watchword for the power of science to destroy humanity, Mary Shelley had a far more open view of science. Don’t mistake the messenger, Victor, for the message. In fact, in her day, “science” had a lower...