PhD, Princeton University
Email: js2897@cam.ac.uk
Jeremy Schneider is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. He is a historian of early modern science, specializing in the earth and environment as forms of knowledge.
His first book project, Reawakening the Ammonites, charts how European naturalists began to interpret fossils as the remnants of extinct species ('lost species') three centuries before the discovery of the dinosaurs. He is further exploring pre-modern awareness of extinction through attempts to conserve rare and endangered animals in the seventeenth century. His second book project, Science and Sense, analyzes the work of visually impaired naturalists and mathematicians, artisans and sculptors, recovering how blind practitioners used their nonvisual senses – particularly touch – to gain insight into nature.
His research has been supported by fellowships from the DAAD, National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Folger Shakespeare Library, Edward Worth Library, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Princeton's Center for Human Values, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is the recipient of the 2017 Trevor Levere Best Paper Prize, the 2022 Mary and Randall Hack Award for Water and the Environment, as well as the 2023 Ronald Rainger Prize in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences.
He received his PhD from Princeton University. He holds a BA in history and MA in philosophy from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He has held year-long research fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, the Warburg Institute in London, and the California Institute of Technology (where he assisted in editing the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein). He has taught students at Princeton, Munich, and NJDOC prisons in the United States.
Talks (video)
'The Blind Naturalist: G. E. Rumphius (1627-1702) and the Problem of Other Minds.' 11 June 2022.
'Extinction in the Ancient World?' 14 May 2021.
Articles
'Hunted to Extinction: Finding Lost Species in the World of Bernard Palissy (1510–89).' Forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly. *Awarded the 2023 Ronald Rainger Prize (see citation).
'Scripting Speech: A Manuscript Declamation in Sixteenth-Century Humanism.' History of Universities 35, 2 (2022): 16–83.
'The First Mite: Insect Genealogy in Hooke's Micrographia.' Annals of Science 75, 3 (2018): 165–200. *Awarded the 2017 Trevor Levere Prize (see citation).
Reviews
Review of Francesco G. Sacco, 'Real, Mechanical, Experimental. Robert Hooke's Natural Philosophy.' Isis 112, 4 (2021): 833–34.
