Seb Falk | Department of History and Philosophy of Science

About

Fellow and Senior Admissions Tutor, Girton College

Research interests: History of astronomy, history of navigation, late medieval sciences, scientific instruments and history of the book in the Middle Ages

Seb Falk's personal website

My research has been centred on the medieval mathematical sciences. I am particularly interested in how science and technology work in practice, including hands-on use of instruments and production of books. I also research how science is communicated across cultures, and the relationships between science and religion, and science and literature.

My first book, The Light Ages, was published in 2020. It won the American Astronomical Society’s Osterbrock Prize 2025, and was shortlisted for the Hughes Prize of the British Society for the History of Science.

I have been a Research Fellow at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Girton College, an AHRC-funded curatorial intern at the Whipple Museum, a BBC New Generation Thinker, and have served as an independent expert to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art.

My next research project is a global history of navigation. Drawing on my own sailing experience, I circumnavigate the world explaining how humans have grappled with the problem of finding out where they are, where they’re going, and why that has mattered.

Selected publications

(many available to download from Seb's website)

The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (Penguin, 2020). Published in the USA as The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (W.W. Norton, 2020). Translations in Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Academic reviews include Isis and The Medieval Review. Many mainstream-media reviews linked here.

"The Diagrams and Replicas of Richard of Wallingford’s Clock", in Tools, Techniques, and Technologies: Essays on Ancient Science and its Reception in Honour of Liba Taub, ed. Laurence Totelin and Emma Perkins (De Gruyter, 2025): 253–277.

(with James Wade) "The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited", Review of English Studies (2025). See the story and video on the Cambridge University website.

"Understanding the Length of Life: the Glosses on Plato of Tivoli's Translation of the Quadripartitum", SCIAMVS 22 (2022): 195–251.

"Copying and Computing Tables in Late Medieval Monasteries", in Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables: Towards a Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences, ed. Matthieu Husson, Clemency Montelle and Benno van Dalen (Brepols, 2021): 79–105.

"'El Capri Kylex': A Franciscan astronomical mnemonic", Journal for the History of Astronomy 52 (2021): 267–288. Available fully open-access.

"Vernacular Craft and Science in the Equatorie of the Planetis", Medium Ævum 88 (2019): 329–60. Available to download from JSTOR.

"Natural Sciences", in Historians on John Gower: Society, Religion and Politics, ed. Stephen H. Rigby (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), 491–525.

"Sacred astronomy? Beyond the stars on a Whipple astrolabe", in The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Instruments and Interpretations, ed. Liba Taub, Joshua Nall and Frances Willmoth (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 11–32. Available fully open-access.

"'I found this written in the other book': Learning Astronomy in Late Medieval Monasteries", Studies in Church History 55 (2019): 129–44.

"A Merton College Equatorium: Text, Translation, Commentary", SCIAMVS 17 (2016): 121–159.

"Learning Medieval Astronomy through Tables: The Case of the Equatorie of the Planetis", Centaurus 58 (2016): 6–25.

"The scholar as craftsman: Derek de Solla Price and the reconstruction of a medieval instrument", Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 68 (2014): 111–134. Available fully open-access.