Dr Edwin Rose

Profile

Edwin Rose is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds where he is commencing the research project ‘Darwinian Inheritance: Communication and Empire in the Making of a Scientific Dynasty’. This research project aims to produce the first connected study of Britain’s longest surviving scientific family, analysing the global context of the Darwin dynasty’s changing approaches to communicating information and interactions with empire from the decades around 1700 to the 1960s.

Before joining the University of Leeds in May 2024 Edwin was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded research Project ‘Natural History in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1848’ based in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Advanced Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, where he was also an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of History. In November 2024, with Staffan Müller-Wille as co-investigator, Edwin received an AHRC/ University of Cambridge Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) grant for the project ‘Naming Species in the South Pacific: Revisiting a Past Endeavour to Develop new Digital and Culture Collaborations’ that aims to digitise, transcribe and translate the botanical manuscripts produced in New Zealand during James Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific between 1768 and 1771. Prior to this Edwin has been Munby Fellow at Cambridge University Library (2020-21) exploring the colonial and religious history of the Cambridge Botanic Garden and a postdoctoral researcher for Darwin College, Cambridge (2021-22) undertaking a project on the Darwin family's relationship with Cambridge between the 1750s and 1950s.

Aspects of Edwin's research on the practices of natural history in the British Empire (c.1760-1820) form a book entitled Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History that it is possible to order in the USA (release date 18th March) and in the UK (release date 13th May Worldwide). An article covering some of the content in this book was published in The Observer on 9 February 2025.

Publications

Book

Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History 1760-1820 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025).

Peer Reviewed Articles

'George Howard Darwin and the "Public" interpretation of The Tides', History of Science, 62:1 (2024), pp. 111–143.

'Empire and the Theology of Nature in the Cambridge Botanic Garden, 1760-1825', Journal of British Studies, 62 (2023), pp. 1011–1042.

'Publishing Nature in an Age of Revolutions: Joseph Banks, Georg Forster and the Plants of the Pacific',Historical Journal, 63:5 (2020), pp. 1132-1159.

'From the South Seas to Soho Square: Joseph Banks's Library, Collection and Kingdom of Natural History', Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 73:4 (2019), pp.499-526. (Part of a special issue entitled 'Rethinking Joseph Banks').

'Gilbert White, John Ray and the Construction of the Natural History of Selborne',Archives of Natural History 46.1 (2019), pp. 105-112.

'Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils', Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 33 (2018), pp. 505-536 (co-authored with Prof. Anna Marie Roos).

'Specimens, Slips and Systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753-1768', The British Journal for the History of Science, 52: 2 (2018), pp. 205-237.

'Natural history collections and the book: Hans Sloane's A Voyage to Jamaica (1707-25) and his Jamaican plants', Journal of the History of Collections, 30: 1 (2018), pp. 15-33.

Peer Reviewed Book Chapters

[IN PRESS] (with Scott Mandelbrote) 'Thomas Gray as a Reader and Writer on the Natural World', in Ruth Abbott and Ephraim Levinson (eds.), Thomas Gray Among the Disciplines (Routledge).

Reviews

'Jordan Goodman. Planting the World: Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany. London: William Collins, 2020. Pp. 560. $32.99 (cloth).'Journal of British Studies, 62, no. 1 (2023), pp. 238-240.

'Cook's Voyages to the Pacific after 250 years. Exhibition review of James Cook: The Voyages, at the British Library, London, April-August 2018. British Library, London',Endeavour, 42 (2018), pp. 204–205.

'James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Allen Lane, 2017)', The British Journal for the History of Science, 50 (2017), pp. 731–732.

Exhibitions, Talks and Public Engagement (selected)

‘Botanical Revolutions 1776–1848’, Library and Archives Reading Room, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

'200 Years of Scientific Publishing at the Cambridge Philosophical Society', 22 January-March 2024, Whipple Library, Cambridge.

'The Darwins and Music: A Concert' (Organised with Francis Knights), 29 October 2022, at Darwin College, Cambridge.

'George Howard Darwin and the 'Public' Understanding of Nature', talk at Cambridge University Library, as part of the events accompanying the Darwin in Conversationexhibiton.

'The Darwin Family and Cambridge: Preliminary Research Scoping', The Darwinian Alumni Newsletter, February 2021.

Qualifications

• PhD, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
• MPhil.History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Cambridge