This is Notes from an Everything Historian, a newsletter about history, culture, art, food, and monsters – and transcending academe to become a full-time writer.

I’m Dr Surekha Davies, historian of science, art, ideas, and monsters (yeah!). After 10+something years in postdocs & faculty jobs in the UK, the US, and the Netherlands, and publishing the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, I turn into a full-time freelance writer as of December 2022.

My next book, Humans: A Monstrous History, is under contract with the University of California Press as a lead trade-list title. As of November 2022, the manuscript is under peer review (yippee-yikes!).

To find out more, please visit my website, www.surekhadavies.org.

This newsletter

Four themes frame this newsletter:

Re-learning to write: follow my real-time, both-and experiment: writing for general audiences while advancing academic scholarship (& getting those zombie articles into print!).

Takes and recs: unconventional reviews of books, museums, podcasts, and what I’m watching - and how they’re changing my thinking.

Adventures in the deep humanities: notes and musings from my research as I track books, manuscripts, and objects.

Something’s happening: publication news (books, articles, essays) and speaking engagements (talks and conferences).

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