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department of History
roinn na staire

aileen fyfe

Aileen Fyfe has been a lecturer in the History Department at Galway since 2000, where she teaches courses in the history of science and  technology, and the history of publishing. She is originally from Glasgow, and was educated there and in Leeds. She studied Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge, before converting to the History and Philosophy of Science for a Ph.D. She was until recently the Treasurer of the British Society for the History of Science, and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for the History of Irish Science. In 2004-05, she was the recipient of an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Fellowship, and was able to be a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge, and a Bibliographical Society of America Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. During her sabbatical leave (2005-06) she was a Senior Visiting Research Scholar at Oxford. Teaching Research interests C.V. (as pdf) Other professional activities Contact details

Teaching

Aileen teaches the following undergraduate lecture courses (not all in every year):

• First-year course (for BA Connect only)
  • CS115 History of Childhood
    
• Second-year courses:
  
  • HI293 A scientific revolution?
  • HI270 History of Science: science in society
  • HI426 Nature and Society in Victorian Britain
    
  • HI410 (Colloquium) The Great Exhibition, 1851
• Final-year courses:
  
  • HI314 History of the book in the industrial age
  • HI317 Science, technology and progress, 1800-1900
  • Hi462 (seminar) Darwin's World
  
  
• MA teaching
  • (MA in History) History of the Book: text or artefact?
    
    
    

She is interested in supervising graduate work in the history of science, technology or medicine, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She would also welcome enquiries from those interested in the history of authorship, journalism, editing, printing, publishing and reading, particularly as they relate to 'non-literary' topics (e.g. non-fiction, popular science, textbooks).

Current and Recent Research Students:

• Juliana Adelman, 'Communities of Science: the Queen's Colleges and scientific culture in provincial Ireland, 1845-1875' (funded by IRCHSS; PhD awarded 2007; PDF of PhD thesis). Juliana is currently an IRCHSS-funded postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin
  
• Laura Kelly, 'Early Irish women medical graduates, c.1877-1922' (funded by IRCHSS). In May 2009, Laura was awarded the History of Medicine in Ireland Essay Prize, for her essay on 'Separate spheres? Women's experience of Irish medical education, c.1880s-1920s
• Caroline Gillan, 'Scientific patronage in 18th-century England: the third earl of Bute'
  

Research Interests

Aileen is currently writing about the the impact of steam-power on the organisation and dissemination of knowledge in the middle of the nineteenth century. She is examining the activities of the Edinburgh publishers W. & R. Chambers, with a particular emphasis on their use of new technologies of production and distribution, and the way they managed and controlled a business which stretched beyond Scotland to England and Ireland, and ultimately to North America. The project also investigates the connections between information and travel - both how information travels, and what information is needed by people who travel.

This project stemmed from Aileen's interest in popular science publishing, which raised questions about who writes on the sciences for wider audiences, and why; at the formats in which these works are published, and the technologies which made it all possible; and at the audiences that these works sought. Her past work has examined books aimed at children and at adults, and written by groups as varied as late eighteenth-century Unitarians and mid-nineteenth-century evangelicals.

She has also been interested in the relations between science and religion, especially but not only in the context of science communication activities. Her Science and Salvation: evangelicals and popular science publishing ( University of Chicago Press, 2004) examined evangelical attitudes to the sciences in the 1840s and 1850s, through a focus on the Religious Tract Society's programme of popular science publishing. A review of this book is available on the Victorian Web.

Latest book: Science in the Marketplace: nineteenth-century sites and experiences (University of Chicago Press, 2007), edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman

From 2003-2006, Aileen directed the 'Networks of Science and Culture in Ireland' project, funded by the Irish Research Council in Humanities and Social Sciences with additional funding from the Royal Irish Academy (Third Sector Research Programme). Two conferences were organised as part of this project: in Galway in 2004, and in Dublin in 2005.

For more information on Aileen's research interests, follow these links:

• Ph.D. thesis: 'Industrialised Conversion: the Religious Tract Society and popular science publishing in Victorian Britain', abstract and text available
• Abstract of Science and Salvation
• The 'Networks of Science and Culture in Ireland' project
• C.V. (as pdf) 
• Links to selected publications (only those available electronically; for full list, see CV)
  

Other Professional Activities

Aileen was Consultant Editor on a series of reprints of Nineteenth-Century Popular Science works published by Thoemmes Press, focusing on 'Science for Children' (2003) and 'Women and Science' (2004). She is on the Editorial Board of Notes and Records of the Royal Society and of the 'Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain' monograph series (Pickering & Chatto), which is currently seeking potential manuscripts.

She was Treasurer (and a Trustee) of the British Society for the History of Science until July 2007, and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for the History of Irish Science. She belongs to the History of Science Society, the Society for Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and the Children's Book History Society.

She was co-organiser of a conference on "Popular Science: nineteenth-century sites and experiences" (York University, Toronto, August 2-3 2004), which resulted in the recently published Science in the Marketplace. 

Contact Details

E-mail: aileen.fyfenuigalway.ie   Office: Room 314, History Department Extension: 3791 Telephone: 353 91 493791

    

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