Public Engagement

I am deeply committed to sharing and communicating my research with non-expert audiences, seeking to challenge dominant, Eurocentric narratives about the origins of the modern sciences. We so often hear stories about the history of science that focus on a narrow cast of men— the Galileos, Newtons, and Keplers—as having revolutionised the sciences in early modern Europe. However, much as it is today, the early modern world was highly globalised, with ideas, objects, and people moving and interacting across oceans. Different cultures’ understandings of the natural world travelled to Europe—often as a result of colonialism—and, in turn, played an important and still overlooked role in shaping burgeoning scientific debates. One of the most pressing issues in the history of science is thus to understand how locally-influenced ideas scale up to shape globally relevant scientific knowledge.

To share my research, which diversifies the history of science, with wider audiences, I have participated in an NPR Short Wave episode for Lunar New Year, and have  written several public-facing articles for the Los Angeles Review of Books, History Workshop Digital Magazine, the Royal Society Blog, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, the Journal for the History of Knowledge Blog, the KCL Medicine and the Making of Race Blog, and BlueSci: Cambridge University Science Magazine. Beyond written public engagement, I have contributed to the "The Things They Carried" virtual exhibition on the global circulation of knowledge, based on a collaboration between Ingenium - Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. I have been interviewed about my research in the JHI Blog. I also communicate my research through  public lectures, including at the Cambridge Festival and at the Royal Institution. In both 2023 and 2024, I was shortlisted as a BBC New Generation Thinker.