Jim Endersby is a specialist in the history of science, with a particular interest in the impact of empire on nineteenth-century Britain, science and literature, and in the reception and influence of Darwinism. He took his first degree in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales, followed by an MPhil and PhD in the HPS Department at Cambridge. After that he became a post-doctoral research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. In 2007, he joined the University of Sussex, where he has been a Reader in the History of Science since 2013. He was also, during 2010, a Distinguished International Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Jim's first book, A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (2007), won the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. It has been published in hardback and paperback in both the UK and the USA. A Spanish translation was published in 2009 and a German one in October 2012. His second, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian Science (2008), was published by the University of Chicago Press and appeared in paperback in 2010. He edited a new edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species that was published by Cambridge University Press in May 2009. His latest book, on a cultural history of orchids, will be published later this year (2015).
Jim's next research project will involve a comparative study of Anglo-American biology in the early twentieth century. He will be looking at the ways in which the broad social and cultural impacts of new biological discoveries functioned to shape the public sphere.
Jim has his own personal page at www.jimendersby.com.
Created 24 March 2015
Last modified 5 March 2021