Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian

Welcome to Notes from a Science Historian, the newsletter at the crossroads of history, science, and monsters!

Scroll cautiously past this Renaissance cyclopes to learn more about me and this newsletter.

a sixteenth-century print of a hairy cyclopes with ears down to their knees and pendulous breasts, seemingly flossing their teeth with a very long strick, peering at the viewer with their one eye, looking relaxed and smiling. Beneath the cyclopes is a French verse. — François Deserps, *Receuil de la diuersité des habits* (Paris, 1562), unpaginated, a cyclopes. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Typ 515.64.734.

In Notes from a Science Historian I explore the stories people tell about science and society: stories often bound up with monsters or monster-making.

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 (now) 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 and includes updates about my new writing, podcast interviews, and speaking events.

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.

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.

To learn more about me and to read some of my newspaper and magazine essays, please visit my website, www.surekhadavies.org.

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