I am currently on research leave, having completed a term as Associate Dean for People, Culture and Inclusion in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities (MAH) at Sussex.

I have been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (beginning in September 2025), for a project called “Darwinian Fans: reading, responding to and reimagining evolution”. The ways Darwinism became part of everyday public culture between 1859 and 2009 will be analysed using a framework adapted from studies of fan cultures. Fans gather around the objects of their desires, often forming communities of those excluded from other arenas, and imaginatively usurp the intentions of the objects’ creators. Treating the diverse communities that read, interpreted and re-imagined what they understood to be ‘Darwinism’ as if they were fan groups allows media-studies tools to create radical new perspectives on long-standing history of science questions, including evolution’s cultural influences and the roles of public science.

I am a specialist in the history of science, with particular interests in: the histories of botanic gardens; the impact of empire on nineteenth-century British science and society; science and literature; and, in the reception and influence of Darwinism. I recently completed a three-year term as visiting professor of the History of Science at Gresham College, London. The free lectures I gave there are live-streamed and can also be found on YouTube (see "media" below).

I have a long-standing professional relationship with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (whose history was the subject of one of my Gresham lectures and was at the heart of my first book, "Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian Science"). I have curated an exhibtion for Kew, provided training to their volunteer guides and -- along with my colleague, Vinita Damodaran -- have had many productive discussions with their staff about all aspects of their history and how it relates to contemporary issues, particularly climate change and protecting biodiversity. I have also worked closely with BBC Radio 4 on programs relating to Kew, particularly the series "Plants: from Roots to Riches". I am currently involved in conversations about Kew's imperial legacy and the need to address contemporary issues around race and decolonisation. My most recent book ("Orchid: a cultural history") was published by Kew in partnership with the University of Chicago Press (2016). It was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for the best book for a general audience by the History of Science Society in November 2018.

My most recent book, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology's Imaginary Futures, 1900--1935, was published by the University of Chicago Press in January 2025. The book examines how various early-twentieth-century publics made creative use of new theories of heredity (particularly the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries). Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid, potentially controllable, evolution. De Vries’ highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own, often wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane and Aldous Huxley, created a new kind of imaginary future – the biotopia – which took the utopian and dystopian possibilities of biology and presented them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding the sciences of life. It recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed fictions from "Brave New World" to the "X-Men" movies while reflecting on the lessons – positive and negative – that this period might offer us. It has been described by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as offering “a fascinating insight into the interplay between science and popular culture and shows that the latter is by no means just a simplified processing of scientific findings”. And the SFRA Review called it “a substantial achievement.... This is interdisciplinary research of the highest order: it transforms our understanding of the period into more complex and subtle forms whilst also setting a high bar for those to follow”.

My next book will on science fiction and human nature (based on my Gresham Lectures).

I did my first degree in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales, followed by an MPhil and PhD in the HPS Department at Cambridge, after which I was a post-doctoral research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. I joined Sussex in 2007, was promoted to senior lecturer in 2009, to Reader in the History of Science in 2013, and Professor in 2018.

Awards, prizes and fellowships

2018: Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize awarded to Orchid: A cultural history, for the best book for a general audience by the History of Science Society.

2016–2017: Awarded Mid-Career fellowship, British Academy.

Since 2015: Member of the editorial board, British Journal for the History of Science.

2011: Imperial Nature awarded the Stafleu Medal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT).

2010: Imperial Nature shortlisted by the international History of Science Society for the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize (awarded biennially for a book in the history of the life sciences and natural history).

2010: Distinguished International Scholar and visiting professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

2007: A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (2007), won the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.