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department of History
roinn na staire

aileen fyfe

As of January, 2011, Dr Aileen Fyfe has taken up a post in St Andrews, Scotland.  She remains an adjunct lecturer in NUI, Galway, seeing the following PhDs to completion: - Laura Kelly, 'Early Irish women medical graduates, c.1877-1922' (based at NUI Galway) - Caroline Gillan, 'Scientific patronage in 18th-century Britain: the third earl of Bute' (based at NUI Galway) Dr Fyfe's webpage in St Andrews is http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/staff/aileenfyfe.html

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

    

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