Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian
Dr. Surekha Davies on history, science, and politics through the stories people tell about monsters.
Scroll cautiously past this Renaissance cyclopes for why you should subscribe.
The stories people tell about science and society have been bound up with ideas about so—called monsters and monster-making for thousands of years.
Join me to learn how monsters lurk in the foundations of the modern world. Recent essays explored movies like Bride! and (of course) Frankenstein, and puzzled through findings from my decades in research libraries, museums, and archives — like the story of Sir Walter Ralegh’s headless men in Guiana.
Notes from a Science Historian appears 2-3 times a month (deadlines permitting). It includes updates about my new writing, podcast interviews, and speaking events.
Subscribe now for free! You’ll automatically receive a subscriber-only essay, “Behind the Smithsonian Magazine essay”, about a piece I wrote for the magazine on a Renaissance painting of hell, and an excerpt from Humans: A Monstrous History.
Who am I?
I’m Dr Surekha Davies, historian of science and author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025) and the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016). I’ve also published essays in Smithsonian Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Science, Nature, Reactor, and elsewhere.
To learn more about me and to read some of my newspaper and magazine essays, please visit my website.
