Dr Isobel Newby

Profile

I returned to the University of Leeds as a PhD candidate in April 2020 having completed my MA here in 2018. I recently completed my doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds’s School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, in a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with The National Archives (TNA), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project explored how different forms, sources, and functions of expertise both shaped and were shaped by the British government’s responses to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD) between 1984 and 2004. This used novel source materials including the previously unstudied papers of the office of the Chief Veterinary Officer at TNA, original oral histories, archival materials associated with the independent inquiry into the official response to BSE, national and local press coverage, and policy papers.

My thesis posed three functional questions:

1. Did scrapie and Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) researchers impact future BSE research and policy?
2. How and why did different forms of expertise and different institutions impact on BSE policymaking and policy implementation?
3. How were relationships within and between these institutions shaped by the BSE episode, and how did they shape official approaches to BSE?

I also discuss a number of conceptual second order questions related to the nature of different kinds of expertise, for example:

• From where is veterinary and other scientific expertise derived?
• How did government justify the consultation of particular kinds of expertise?
• What was the role of formal and informal collaborative networks on the development and performance of expertise?
• What impact does nationality and social strata have on a scientist’s approach to nontherapeutic research?
• How are specialist institutions impacted by knowledge ambiguities and conceptual uncertainties?

Since 2021 I have taught on a number of undergraduate history of science modules and in 2024 I was awarded an Associate Fellowship of Advance Higher Education in recognition of my pedagogical practice. I will be teaching on the following modules in the 2025/6 academic year:

• Darwin, Germs and The Bomb
• History of Psychology
• History of Modern Medicine
• Living With Technology
• Magic, Science and Religion

Research interests

Though my doctoral work focused on 20^th century science policy, my research interests span all aspects of modern history, integrated HPS and STS methods. I intend to develop work done in the thesis to investigate a transnational history of the development of ideas and practices surrounding prion diseases, embracing an interdisciplinary approach.

List of publications:

‘Scientific Expertise and Independence in a Time of Crisis: Advisory Groups on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, 1988-1990’, British Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming 2026).

With Professor James Stark, ‘Alice in Taxonomyland: Systematics in mid-Twentieth Century Microbiology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (forthcoming 2025).

‘Constructive Cooperation in Nontherapeutic Veterinary Institutions: An Historical Perspective’ in Carol Gray, Alison Skipper and Ruth Serlin, eds., An Introduction to Veterinary Humanities (Routledge, forthcoming 2025)

‘Using archives to examine the BSE epidemic’, The National Archives blog (2024)

‘Cow 133 at the Central Veterinary Laboratory: Recognising a Novel Zoonosis’, Midland Historical Review, 7 (2023)

'Review of ‘Hansson, Kristofer and Rachel Irwin, editors. Movement of Knowledge: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Medicine, Science, and Experience. Nordic Academic Press, 2020’', British Medical Journal (Medical Humanities) (2022)

Qualifications

• MA History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds
• BA History, University of Hull