PhD, Princeton University
Email: js2897@cam.ac.uk
Jeremy Robin Schneider is a historian of early modern science. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2023. He was then appointed Research Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he works at present and is affiliated with History and HPS. In July 2025 he will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University.
Jeremy's research focuses on premodern knowledge of earth, life, and environment. His first book project, The Graveyard of Shells, shows how Europeans used the fossilized remains of shells to conceive extinct species ('lost species') three centuries before the discovery of the dinosaurs. His second book project, Science and Sense, will analyze the work of visually impaired naturalists, mathematicians, and artisans, recovering how blind practitioners used their nonvisual senses – particularly touch – to gain insight into the natural world.
His research has been recognized with various prizes, including the Ronald Rainger Prize by the History of Science Society, Trevor Levere Prize by Annals of Science, and Mary & Randall '69 Hack Award by the High Meadows Environmental Institute. His scholarship has been supported by the DAAD, National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Folger Shakespeare Library, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Princeton's Center for Human Values, and the Smithsonian Institution. In 2024 the German Society for the History and Theory of Biology awarded him the Caspar Friedrich Wolff Medal.
Jeremy was born in Heidelberg, obtaining BA and MA from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Before graduate school at Princeton, he trained at the University of California-Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology (where he assisted in editing the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein). He has taught students at Cambridge, Princeton, and Munich, as well as in NJDOC prisons. He welcomes approaches from students on all levels.
A brief CV can be found here.
Book-in-progress
The Graveyard of Shells: Extinct Species in Premodern Europe. *Awarded the 2024 Caspar Friedrich Wolff Medal (see citation).
Articles
'Hunted to Extinction: Finding Lost Species in the World of Bernard Palissy (1510–89).' Renaissance Quarterly 77, 2 (2024), 493-528. *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).
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.
Reviews
Review of Francesco G. Sacco, 'Real, Mechanical, Experimental. Robert Hooke's Natural Philosophy.' Isis 112, 4 (2021): 833–34.
