BSHS Council
Council is the elected governing body of the BSHS. It consists of five Officers and nine Ordinary Members, who meet three times a year to discuss and approve Society business. Terms of office are as laid out in the Policies and Procedures (available to members by a request to the execsec@bshs.org.uk.) Nominations for successors to outgoing members of Council are sought from the whole membership each spring; new members of Council are elected at an Extraordinary General Meeting, held in the summer of each year and open to all BSHS members.
This page lists the members of the Society’s governing Council and other committees.
Officers of Council
Chiara Ambrosio is a Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Science and Technology Studies (UCL). Her research focuses on representation across art and science, with a specific focus on nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture. Her published works combine philosophical accounts of representation with historical investigations into particular modes of image-making, such as diagrams and photographs, and the debates around their epistemological status at the turn of the century. The conceptual framework underpinning her research draws substantially on the pragmatist philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, and she is currently working on Peirce’s history and historiography of science.
Dr Rebekah Higgitt is Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland, having previously been a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and Curator of History of Science at Royal Museums Greenwich. Her research focuses on history of astronomy, institutional knowledge cultures and scientific instrument makers. She was Co-I or PI on ‘The Board of Longitude 1714-1828: Science, innovation and empire in the Georgian world’, ‘Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the creative communities of the scientific instrument trade, 1550-1914’ and ‘Metropolitan Science: Places, objects and cultures of practice and knowledge in London, 1600-1800’, and is author or co-author of Recreating Newton, Finding Longitude, Maskelyne: Astronomer Royal, Metropolitan Science and The Board of Longitude.
Ben Marsden is a Senior Lecturer in History of Science and Technology at the University of Aberdeen. After long periods spent as Head of the History Department he is now a Director of Postgraduate Studies. His research relates to the cultural history of engineering, broadly construed, in the long nineteenth century. His book Engineering empires (co-written with Crosbie Smith) has recently been translated into Chinese. He has published on the history of engineering in British universities, on the literary strategies of engineers, and on the connections between science and music, among other topics. He continues to explore the biography of academic engineer and poet W. J. M. Rankine. He is the co-director of the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Aberdeen.
Amanda Rees, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, is a historian of science primarily interested in the history of the field sciences, of human/animal relationships and of the future. Her published research, from 2009’s The Infanticide Controversy: the Art of Field Science to 2019’s forthcoming edition of Osiris, Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science (co-edited with Iwan Rhys Morus), reflect these broad-ranging interests. She has previously edited various journal special issues, including the second volume of BJHS THEMES (Animal Agents, 2017), and has also written widely for the popular press.
Alice White is a Digital Editor at English Heritage. Her job involves commissioning and writing articles about history and making ideas and collections accessible to as many people as possible. She has previously worked at Wellcome Collection as an editor and Wikimedian; as a freelance researcher on projects including a government inquiry, and a history of science fiction fandom; and as a secondary school teacher. Her doctoral research examined the history of human relations in mid-Twentieth Century Britain.
Ordinary Members of Council
Jonathan Topham is Professor of History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. His research relates mainly to the history of printed communication in science, and to science and religion, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Jon’s recentmonograph, Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (Chicago University Press, 2022) was awarded the 2023 academic book prize of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is currently working on a project, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant, re-examining the epoch-making programme of cheap publishing of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826–46).
Rebecca (Becky) Martin is an early career researcher who specialises in the history of colonial medical education, anatomical models, and race science. As well as co-editing the increasingly popular undergraduate textbook Women in the History of Science, she also co-authored the 2023 Colonial History Report for the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In her postdoctoral roles, she has researched topics from the systematisation of healthcare in late-colonial Nigeria to the creation of positive research culture in the present-day biosciences. Becky recently held a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, exploring the colonial history and photography of the HMS Challenger expedition and is currently part of the AHRC-funded ‘Making the Museum’ project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. She previously helped to organise elements of the 2018 BSHS/ESHS joint conference in London.
Michael Barany is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he researches the history and culture of modern science and mathematics. He has valued being a part of the BSHS community since first coming to the United Kingdom on a Marshall Scholarship for postgraduate study. He currently leads the UKRI Horizon guarantee project Situating International and Global Mathematics (https://sigma.mathsworlds.org), on the institutional and infrastructural globalisation of modern professional mathematical research. He is also interested in collaborative and open approaches to undergraduate and postgraduate history of science teaching (https://study.histsci.scot).
Dr Nathan Bossoh is a History Research Fellow at Southampton University. His main research intersects around the themes of science, medicine, museums, environment, and African Studies from 1750 to the present. Between September 2022 and September 2023, he was the African Collections Research Curator at the (London) Science Museum, where he now remains a Research Associate.
Brigitte Stenhouse is a Lecturer in History of Mathematics at the Open University, UK, where her research focuses on mathematics in Britain and Europe during the long nineteenth century. Her doctoral research mobilised the extensive collection of letters and manuscripts of Mary Somerville (1780-1872) to investigate what it meant for Somerville, as an upper-class woman, to access mathematical knowledge and cultivate a reputation for herself within a scientific community. Stenhouse was the co-leader of a project on collaborative couples in mathematics, which sought to understand the roles played by domesticity and gender in the construction of mathematical identities and careers. She is currently leading the Contextualising the Curriculum project at the OU, building an online, interactive database of primary sources selected to demonstrate the global development of mathematics. Stenhouse is an active member of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, holding the position of Meetings Coordinator.
Advisory Members of Council
- Conferences Committee Chair: Dr Sam Robinson, University of York
- Communications Officer: Dr Alexander Stoeger, Saarland University (website & social media)
- Viewpoint Editor: Dr Joseph Holloway, University of Exeter
- Archivist: Dr Alexander Aylward, University of Oxford
- Postgraduate Representative: Elena Morgana, University of Oxford
Executive Secretary
- Society administration in general is dealt with on a paid basis by the Executive Secretary, who plays a crucial role in the running of the Council, and attends its meetings.
- The Executive Secretary also supports the work of the Committees as appropriate.
- Contact: office@bshs.org.uk