Post:	Senior Lecturer
Location:	Arts A A166
Email:	J.J.Endersby@sussex.ac.uk
	Personal homepage
Telephone numbers
Internal:	8005
UK:	(01273) 678005
International:	+44 1273 678005

Biography

I am a specialist in the history of science, with particular interest in the impact of empire on nineteenth-century Britain, and in the reception and influence of Darwinism.

My first book, 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. It has been published in hardback and paperback in the UK and USA, and a Spanish translation was published in 2009. My second, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian Science (2008), was published by the University of Chicago Press and will be appearing in paperback in 2010. I edited a new edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species that was published by Cambridge University Press in May 2009.

I am also writing a history of imperial science and classification for Atlantic Books (UK) that will be published by Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Company) in the US. Tentatively called The Skulls in the Basement, it will explore the connections between science and empire during Coleridge's "Second Scientific Revolution", by looking at the ways new sciences were shaped by new classifications.

My next research project will involve a comparative study of Anglo-American biology in the inter-war period, looking at national scientific traditions and national identity by analysing scientific practices.  

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 and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2009.

Role

Undergraduate admissions tutor (since October 2009).

Research

History of the 19th and 20th-century life sciences, especially natural history museums and botanic gardens; Joseph Dalton Hooker; history of taxonomy and classification; Charles Darwin, evolution and related issues; development of the twentieth-century modern evolutionary synthesis; history and sociology of experimental organisms; Constantine Samuel Rafinesque; Hugo de Vries, the Mutation Theory and Oenothera Lamarckiana.

Teaching

I teach the following courses:

A Darwinian Revolution?

This course is part of the First Year "Historical Controversy" course (V1272), which critically examines the idea that Darwinism represented a revolution that transformed everything from science to religion to humanity's understanding of itself.

Science and History

This is a third year "Past and Present" course. Its aim is to understand how some important contemporary scientific issues have been shaped by history, as a way of helping you develop a critical facility in the literature and historiography of key issues in the history of science. The emphasis is on seeing science as an integral part of wider issues in social, political, economic and cultural history; a key theme of the course is the relationship between science and imperialism, which exemplifies these wider connections.

Imagining the Future: scientific daydreams and nightmares

Imagining the Future is a History Special Subject, which examines how the sciences have shaped the ways in which the future has been imagined. From novels like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) to movies like Gattaca (1997), science has helped us imagine what the future will be like. Whether it will be a scientific paradise, like HG Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923), or nightmares like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), the science of the author's day has invariably provided a starting point for thinking about what is to come. This course examines the 'history of the future', using literary utopias and dystopias in which science and its consequences are central, as a means of examining the ways in which the public's attitudes to science are reflected in and shaped by such fictions.

Publications

Books & book chapters

Una historia de la biología según el conejillo de Indias: Las plantas y los animales que nos han enseñado a entender la vida (Spanish translation of A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, Editorial Ariel, 2009)

New edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (Cambridge University Press, May 2009).

‘A Gunn and two Hookers', chapter in McCalman, Iain & Erskine, Nigel (eds) In the Wake of the Beagle: Science in the Southern Oceans from the Age of Darwin (University of New South Wales Press, May 2009).

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian science. The book uses the career of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) to explore three of the major themes in the historiography of Victorian science: the reception of Darwinism; the consequences of empire; and, the emergence of a scientific profession. Each of its nine thematic chapters looks at a particular scientific practice - such as travelling, classifying or writing - and examines its role in Hooker's work and its broader significance in the rapidly developing social world of nineteenth-century science (published by the University of Chicago Press, May 2008).

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology: the animals and plants who taught us the facts of life, which won the inaugural Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. An introduction to the history of biology intended for a non-academic audience, which focusses on the experimental organisms which were central to the understanding of sexual reproduction, inheritance and genetics (UK edition, William Heinemann, hbk 2007, pbk 2008; US edition, Harvard University Press, hbk 2007, pbk, 2009; Spanish edition, Editorial Ariel, 2009).

‘Classifying Sciences: Systematics and Status in mid-Victorian Natural History', in Daunton, M. (ed.) The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2005): 61-85.

‘Darwin on generation, pangenesis and sexual selection'. In J. Hodge & G. Radick (eds.) Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2003; second edition, 2009): 69-91.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

'Lumpers and Splitters: Darwin, Hooker, and the search for order'. Science, 11 December 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5959, pp. 1496–1499.

'"The Vagaries of a Rafinesque": imagining and classifying American nature', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 3, September 2009: 168–178.

'Sympathetic science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker and the passions of Victorian naturalists', Victorian Studies (Darwin 200th anniversary issue), Winter 2009, Vol. 51, No. 2, Pages 299-320 .

‘"From having no Herbarium". Local knowledge vs. metropolitan expertise: Joseph Hooker's Australasian correspondence with William Colenso and Ronald Gunn'. Pacific Science, 2001, Vol. 55, No. 4: 343-358.

‘"The Realm of Hard Evidence": novelty, persuasion and collaboration in botanical cladistics', Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Vol. 32, No. 2 (June 2001): 343-360.

‘A Garden Enclosed: Botanical barter in Sydney, 1818-1839' British Journal for the History of Science. 2000, Vol. 33, No. 118, September 2000: 313-334.

‘The Evolving Museum', Public Understanding of Science, 6 (1997): 185-206.

Book reviews:

I review regularly for the the Times Literary Supplement and for the Sunday Telegraph. My reviews have also appeared in many scholarly journals including: The British Journal for the History of Science; History of Science; Isis; Minerva; The Quarterly Review of Biology; Metascience; Victorian Studies, and, The Journal of the History of Biology.