Dissertation and essay supervisors

This is a list of people who are willing to supervise Part II dissertations, Part III essays and dissertations, and MPhil essays and dissertations, together with the topics they are prepared to supervise.

Before you contact a potential supervisor, please read the advice about supervision in the appropriate students' guide. Supervisors' contact details can be found on Lookup.

You may find it helpful to search this page (Ctrl+F on Windows, ⌘F on Mac) for key words associated with the topics that interest you.

Senior Academic Staff

Anna Alexandrova

Not supervising in 2025–26

  • General philosophy of science (including models, causation, laws, explanation, values, feminist and social epistemology, metascience)
  • Philosophy of the social and psychological sciences (including rational choice and game theory applications, philosophy of economics, measurement, psychometrics, John Stuart Mill)
  • Topics in philosophy of healthcare and policy (quantification, mental health, behavioural policy, social engineering)
  • Topics in ethics and political philosophy (well-being, happiness, paternalism)
  • Topics in recent history of social science (including science and governance, evidence based policy, citizen science)

Dissertations previously supervised by Anna Alexandrova

  • Issues of autonomy and collective responsibility in the antimicrobial resistance crisis
  • What are the philosophical challenges facing policy makers in trying to reduce health inequalities?
  • Medicalisation, conscientious objection and moral identity: do we ought to set limits to the expansion of the medical moral community?
  • Who is afraid of multiple measures?
  • Evaluating effectiveness: the challenges and opportunities of psychedelic-assisted therapy
  • Against life satisfaction alone
  • Beyond aesthetic transformation: ethical scrutiny of facial feminisation surgery and the erosion of authenticity in the pursuit of femininity
  • Towards a science of disinformation
  • Information asymmetry in user-recommender system interactions: a game theoretic framework for algorithmic transparency
  • Climate technocracy: the pristine illusions of integrated assessment modelling
  • Pluralism in scientific explanations of intimate partner violence
  • History and philosophy of the autistic spectrum

Mary Augusta Brazelton

Not supervising in Michaelmas Term 2025

Global historical studies of science and medicine, including:

  • Transnational science and medicine
  • International and global public health
  • History of science and medicine in modern East Asia, especially China

Dissertations previously supervised by Mary Augusta Brazelton

  • The hookworm epidemic in colonial Sri Lanka
  • Washing away of wrongs: Herbert Giles' 1923 interpretation of the coroners' handbook 'Xiyuan jilu' as a site of scientific translation and European knowledge-making about China
  • Investigation of the role of technology in scientific exchange programmes between the UK and China in the 1970s
  • From discourse to praxis: birth control movement in Republican China (1922–1937)
  • A story of conservatism or careful consideration? Vaccinal syphilis and the introduction of animal lymph for smallpox vaccination in England in the second half of the 19th century
  • Smallpox vaccination and native challenges to state biopower in Canada, 1867–1899
  • Building coherency: early 20th-century international drug policy
  • Benjamin Hobson and translations of western medicine in China's late Qing dynasty
  • Manson and his milk: Hong Kong's dairy farm, dietetics, and the rise of tropical medicine, 1883–1912
  • Care and control in the contact zone: the evolution of Alison Izzett's colonial social work approach in Nigeria between 1945 and 1960
  • Complicating co-operation: how the post-war incentives of the British Empire nudged the World Health Organization towards eradication
  • 'Science as a diplomatic weapon': scientific freedoms in Sino-British exchanges, 1961–1966

Philippa Carter

  • Early understandings of mental and physical illness
  • Bodies and embodiment
  • Mind/body relations
  • Disability and visible difference
  • Disease categorisation and diagnosis
  • The boundaries between natural philosophy, magic, and religion
  • Sciences of the psyche

Dissertations previously supervised by Philippa Carter

  • Contextualising the work of medieval Arabian oculists through the lens of 20th-century ophthalmologists
  • 'Terrible and beautiful to behold': equine–human relations in England, 1580–1650
  • Hair of the dog that bit you: how were treatments for bites meant to work in medieval England?
  • How have ideas of urbanisation as a cause of mental illness affected/influenced psychiatric policy and practice in Nigeria?
  • Blaming the parents: monstrous birth narratives in early modern Britain
  • Richard Saunders' chiromancy and the decline of astrology in early modern England
  • Conceptualising and contextualising lethargy in England, 1580–1700
  • Ageing and lunacy in early modern England: preparing for the inevitability of memory loss
  • 'Strangeness', witchcraft, and natural disease: understandings of bodily disorder in early modern England
  • Spirits, science and sanity: exploring the interplay between religion, traditional healers and Western psychiatry in Nigeria
  • 'The detestable rabbit-breeding woman': Mary Toft and the medical community of 1726
  • 'Stupified with an extasie of pleasure': female sexual pleasure in early English medical understandings of conception

Hasok Chang

  • General philosophy of science, including realism, reductionism, explanation, demarcation, progress and confirmation
  • History and philosophy of physics
  • History and philosophy of chemistry
  • Philosophy of scientific practice
  • Pragmatism
  • Pluralism
  • Historiography and HPS methodology

Dissertations previously supervised by Hasok Chang

  • Massimi's perspectival realism as a weaker form of scientific realism: a critical comparison with traditional scientific realism
  • Dr Gamow explores the atom: George Gamow in Europe, 1928–1934
  • Modern classical macroeconomics, incommensurability, and new prospects for pluralism in macroeconomics
  • Breakable knowledge: the craft of photography on the 1919 eclipse expedition to Sobral
  • Conant's philosophy of science and education
  • Breaking the loop: an integrative pluralism approach to causal explanations of psychedelic-assisted therapy
  • Romantic pragmatism: bringing the heartbeat back to pragmatist philosophy
  • Towards a Deweyan reconstruction of human potential
  • Heideggerian and Quinean holism
  • A mentalist theory of medical natural kinds
  • Resolving epistemic diversity in scientific pluralism
  • Electronegativity: a new challenge for reductionism, a new case for emergence

Rosanna Dent

Global histories of science, medicine and technology, from the 19th century to the present, including:

  • History of science, technology and medicine in Latin America
  • History of human subjects research
  • Pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies
  • Race science, genetics, genomics, and anthropology
  • Histories of fieldwork, collecting and collections
  • Technoscience as it relates to development, decolonization, infrastructure, and internal colonialism
  • Ethnography, feminist STS, and oral history as methodologies in history of science

Dissertations previously supervised by Rosanna Dent

  • Edward Bancroft's accounts of the peoples of Dutch Guiana
  • A study of antiretroviral programs: how TASO established itself in post-war Uganda
  • Latinx experiences of AIDS
  • Caring for axolotls: restauration ecology and the sociotechnical imaginaries of the Chinampa-Refuge
  • Medical diplomats: Chinese medical missions in Cold War Africa, 1970s–90s
  • Hurricane Helene and rural healthcare: a case study of belonging, disaster and community response

Harriet Fagerberg

  • Issues related to biological function
  • Philosophy of ecology
  • Philosophy of medicine (particularly nature of disease)
  • Philosophy of psychiatry (particularly nature of mental illness and relationship between mental illness and brain disease)
  • Natural kinds and social kinds

Matt Farr

  • Metaphysics of science (especially time, causation, modality)
  • Philosophy of physics (especially causality in physics)
  • General philosophy of science (especially explanation and laws of nature)
  • Philosophy of cognitive science (especially time perception and agency)

Dissertations previously supervised by Matt Farr

  • In what sense are mental disorders natural kinds?
  • The philosophy and sociology of ADHD
  • The arrow of time: investigating the interplay between thermodynamics and time
  • The field of organized retentional modulation: a neurophenomenological model of temporal experience
  • Are laws static? Why we should be agnostic about whether laws of nature change
  • In what sense is the universe mathematical? A metaphysical reconstruction of the mathematical universe hypothesis, to act as a framework for future engagement
  • Is philosophical presentism compatible with relativity?
  • How should the metaphysics and ontology of the 'many-worlds' interpretation be understood?
  • The case for state intervention to reduce problem gambling
  • I is for interpretation: the compatibility of the ABC theories of time with quantum mechanics
  • Against the paradigm shift in autism science – a hybrid model of autism
  • Pan-dispositionalism, categoricalism, and the mixed view: a metametaphysical case study

Marta Halina

  • Philosophy of cognitive science (psychology, neuroscience, animal cognition, artificial intelligence)
  • Philosophy of biology (model organisms, mechanisms, comparative methods, cognitive evolution)
  • General philosophy of science (evidence, explanation, experiments, science and values)

Dissertations previously supervised by Marta Halina

  • Testing the limits: evaluating AI agents in diverse game environments
  • Are non-human animals persons? A philosophical analysis of personhood in regard to animal rights
  • The evolution of social learning: is imitation uniquely human?
  • Identifying depression in non-human animals: model organisms and the challenges of diagnosis
  • Is biological function a requirement for consciousness?
  • What happens to intuition when science adopts machine learning? A case study of human–machine tacit knowledge dynamics in de novo protein design
  • Talking to yourself? The roles of inner speech in constructing the self
  • Magic tricks and animal minds: the case for cognitive load theory
  • Cetaceans and behavioural science: a case for the use of anecdotes as evidence
  • Differentiating intelligence and intuition: a study in comparative psychology
  • The effect of intuitive dualism on 21st century psychiatric treatment
  • Virtual reality

Nick Hopwood

History of medicine and biology since 1800, especially in German-speaking Europe, Britain and the United States; visual communication and the media of science:

  • Reproductive sciences, technologies and medicine, including the still largely unexplored history of in vitro fertilization and other Cambridge innovations and institutions
  • Visual communication and the media of science, e.g. book illustration, icons of evolution, models and other visual aids, microscopical techniques, training for scientific and medical artists, portraits, anatomy museums, exhibitions
  • Other topics in the history of laboratory biology, evolutionary biology and medicine

Dissertations previously supervised by Nick Hopwood

  • Contraception provisions for South Asians in post-war Britain
  • The British debate on gene editing of human embryos
  • The Apgar Score
  • The psychiatric prescription of occupational therapy in interwar Britain
  • The making of Edge Knowledge: John Brockman, the Third Culture, and the promotion of science writers in the dot-com era
  • Cryptic diseases and the invention of a veterinary history: the mutual complication of epizootic science and international policy between the world wars
  • Science in the smoke: the rise and decline of the UK Medical Research Council's Air Pollution Research Unit
  • Asthma, self-management and the peak flow meter, 1965–1995
  • Lennart Nilsson's fetal photographs in Britain (1965 to 1975)
  • Presenting women as army surgeons: visual representations of female doctors at Endell Street Military Hospital
  • Animals in the diagnostic laboratory: the rise and fall of living pregnancy tests in Britain and beyond, 1929–1964
  • Researching the brain: the Corsellis collection at Runwell Hospital in the 1950s

Stephen John

  • Issues in the philosophy of public health (including Evidence Based Medicine, philosophy of epidemiology, justice and public health policy, distribution of healthcare, libertarian paternalism)
  • Science and values (including science funding, the role of values in research, inductive risk, philosophical issues in science communication, risk analysis)
  • Epistemology and ethics (including testimony, the knowledge norm for action)
  • Environmental ethics (including the precautionary principle, environmental value)
  • Medical ethics (including double effect, non-identity problem, euthanasia)

Dissertations previously supervised by Stephen John

  • Policy advice in the case of impact studies: the case of the megabassines in France
  • Prisoners of the narrative: exploring epistemic authority and the enduring legacy of the Stanford Prison Experiment
  • A diplomatic data war: questions of biodiversity database design and curation for environmental assessments
  • A NICE argument against the NHS
  • The Midas standard: the randomised controlled trial as a 'gold standard' and its politicisation
  • 'Where should a philosopher go to learn about technology?' Bitcoin and user-relative value embedding in technological artefacts
  • Models and values between science and decision making
  • The case for performative paternalism
  • The ethics of self-medication for obesity
  • Super soldiers: the ethical risks of human augmentation in the military
  • Medical paternalism in the treatment of BRCA1/2 variant carriers in the UK
  • Children's obligations to vaccinate, parents' obligations not to vaccinate

Tim Lewens

  • Philosophy of biology
  • Philosophical bioethics
  • General topics in the philosophy of science
  • Science and values

Dissertations previously supervised by Tim Lewens

  • The treatment-enhancement distinction
  • The ethics of breeding pedigree animals
  • Genetic exceptionalism
  • The less I know the better: nocebo side effects and the ethics of side effect information
  • Why the Precautionary Principle is incoherent: a virtue-based explanation
  • Bones of contention: against Adrian Currie's species 'plurealism'
  • Defending a regulative value-free ideal
  • COVID-19 vaccination for children from ethnic minorities
  • A case for limited pharmaceutical paternalism
  • Evolutionary debunking arguments, evolutionary science, and empathy
  • The ethics of germline modification
  • From value-freedom to fair procedures: making the science behind public policy legitimate

Dániel Margócsy

  • History of early modern science and technology
  • History of early modern medicine
  • The global history of science
  • Commerce and science
  • The history of the book
  • Visual studies of science

Dissertations previously supervised by Dániel Margócsy

  • The purpose of botanical remedies in early modern lecture notes: teaching practical medicine at the European university
  • Dissecting diagrams: the nature of anatomical representation in Andreas Vesalius' De Fabrica (1543)
  • A bridge between the secular and divine: an investigation into the 'wound man' as a representation of the intersections between Affective piety and medical practice in late medieval Europe
  • Imagining wonders: the evolution of lusus naturae from natural marvels to a social construct in 18th-century thought
  • 'Of the bones': visual representations of the female pelvis and the origins of pelvimetry in 18th-century midwifery
  • John Harries: a 19th-century magician, physician, and reader
  • Shifting boundaries: a study of William Heberden's (1710–1801) materia medica cabinet in St John's College, Cambridge
  • 'Be well skill'd in the Tools by which Nature doth her work': constructions of the hymen in 17th-century England
  • How did the distinction between men and women impact medical practices in the early modern period?
  • Geology and palaeontology in the 17th century: Robert Hooke and John Woodward
  • Not despite their gender, but because of it: women as producers and practitioners of medical knowledge in 17th-century England
  • Quantifying illness: the epidemiological and demographic use of statistics in early modern England

Staffan Müller-Wille

  • History and philosophy of natural history, systematics and taxonomy
  • History and philosophy of heredity, evolution and genetics
  • History and philosophy of anthropology, statistics and race
  • History of collecting and information processing in the early modern and modern earth, life and human sciences
  • Philosophy of biology (gene concept, species concept, experimentation, evolution)

Dissertations previously supervised by Staffan Müller-Wille

  • The pocket laboratory: the use of the blowpipe and the development of the new chemistry in 18th and 19th centuries
  • Eugenic internationalisms: Corrado Gini in the interwar Americas
  • The madness of Patrick Blair: the rise and fall of a syncretic botanical taxonomy
  • Linnaeus's binomial system: a taxonomic revolution and its influence on information exchange in natural history
  • Understanding the interplay between race, racism and science: how was the political document released by UNESCO to a post-war society crafted by natural and social scientists?
  • Genomics, race and whitening in late 20th–21st century Brazil
  • How did pressure from those outside of the deaf community influence deaf education in the UK between 1750 and 1900?
  • How prominent was scientific racism in early genetic theories?
  • Kurt Gödel's philosophical notebooks: notebook-writing as a way of leading a philosophical life
  • The East India Company and the ways in which it carried out the analysis and collection of data for imperial activities
  • The baby in the cybernetic bath: biological teleology between autopoietic self-maintenance and cybernetic adaptivity
  • The doctrine of signatures and the New World

Joshua Nall

History of scientific material culture, astronomy, and popular science in the 19th and 20th centuries, in particular:

  • Scientific instruments and models in the modern physical sciences
  • Astronomy in the British empire
  • Astrophysics and astrobiology, 1860–1920
  • Museums, exhibitions and expositions in the fin de siècle
  • Popular science, media networks, scientific journalism, 1860–1920

Dissertations previously supervised by Joshua Nall

  • Longitude, navigation and slavery in the 18th century
  • Herschel and Uranus in the public sphere
  • 'Exhibits of processes': working agricultural laboratories and other industrial science demonstrations at international exhibitions, 1893 to 1915
  • John Kendrew and the progression of myoglobin protein models, 1950–1975
  • Robert S. Whipple as collector, donor and historian (1871–1953)
  • Models of authority: the place of geological models in the visual language of geology
  • Early 20th-century debates over life on Mars and their impact on the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast incident
  • Abandoned cases: the end of solar eclipse expeditions from the University of Cambridge and other British institutions

Charu Singh

Not supervising in 2025–26

Global histories of science, medicine and technology, including:

  • History of science, medicine in modern South Asia, especially India
  • Global histories of science; traditions of scientific knowledge around the world; history of traditional medicine
  • Social and cultural history of science: the relations between science, religion and politics; science and literature
  • Languages, media, and publics of science: translation, print media, intellectual communities, 'popular'/vernacular science
  • Scientific literacy, science activism, citizen science
  • Historiography of global science and knowledge; the history of 'history of science'

Dissertations and essays previously supervised or co-supervised by Charu Singh

  • Zoology, Orientalism and translation: a medieval Arabic animal lexicon at the frontier of the British Raj, 1873–1908
  • When did the science of exegesis become the exegesis for science? A brief re-evaluation of the life and Quran commentary of an Ottoman naval physician
  • Exploring the emergence of puericulture in Ecuador during the 1920s and 30s
  • To what extent did ancient Indian medical practices become intertwined with Indian nationalism in the early 20th century?
  • Between colonial and national science: the formative years of the Indian Science Congress
  • Science and Culture and its promotion of Meghnad Saha's vision for scientific practice in India
  • Career opportunity for whom? The Dufferin Fund's approach to traditional midwifery in British India, 1880–1920

Richard Staley

The history of the physical sciences (broadly construed) from the 19th century to the present, including in particular:

  • The relations between material, intellectual, social and cultural dimensions of science
  • Instruments and the material culture of science
  • Exhibitions, scientific congresses, and other approaches to (inter)nationalism in science
  • Science in the fin de siècle, science and modernity, science and literature
  • Physics and other disciplines; the relations between the physical and human sciences
  • Laboratory, observatory, field and infrastructural sciences
  • Climate change
  • Science and technology in the 20th century
  • Science and war
  • Aspects of the history of anthropology
  • Artificial intelligence

Dissertations previously supervised by Richard Staley

  • Assembling a theory: how the Nuffield workshops shaped inflationary cosmology
  • Between principle and pragmatism: China and the Cold War nuclear non-proliferation regime, 1971–1985
  • From laboratory medicine to Artificial Intelligence: interpretability and the preservation of diagnostic authority in American medicine
  • Virunga National Park
  • Britain and the Space Race
  • Theorising astronautics
  • Is it all just 'blah, blah, blah'? Words in action: an analysis of language use at COP26
  • Rivers of scale: hydraulic models and developmental logics in mid-20th-century India
  • Becoming alternative: an investigation of Anglo-American print media and the cultural position of solar generated energy
  • The science of fatness in 20th-century America
  • Nova's Ark: existential threat, space colonization, and inevitable expansion, 1960–1980
  • The nuclear option: the role of nuclear energy in Britain's low-carbon future

Research Fellows, Teaching Associates and Affiliates

Salim Al-Gailani

History of health and medicine since 1800, especially in Britain and the United States:

  • Reproductive technologies and medicine, including around pregnancy, childbirth, birth control and abortion
  • Topics in the history of anatomy, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology
  • Medical museums and their uses; material culture of medicine/life sciences and scientific collecting
  • Medicine and the public, including public health campaigns, health guides, patient-consumers, and health activism
  • History of nutrition and nutritional guidelines, vitamins and health foods
  • History of disability

Dissertations previously supervised by Salim Al-Gailani

  • War, PTSD and the media: how British newspapers influenced the construction of perceptions surrounding PTSD from 1980 to 2011
  • The evolution of the voluntarily childfree movement in Britain and its depiction through the lens of the British media between 1975 and 2005: a matter of liberation or lamentation?
  • The Wendy Savage case and the politics of childbirth in 1980s Britain
  • Maternal health disparities in neoliberal Britain: the politics of ethnic minority maternity care since the 1980s
  • Keeping the house clean: women and germ theories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
  • Positioning weight-loss drugs in British public health: Ponderax in the 1960s and 1970s
  • How did medicalisation throughout the late modern period change perceptions of children born with congenital abnormalities or disabilities?
  • Reconstructing the medical debate over the use of chemotherapy in childhood leukaemia in 1960s Britain
  • The development of ethnic minority care in NHS mental health services
  • The National Spastics Society and cerebral palsy in Britain, 1951–1970
  • The history of polio eradication campaigns in Pakistan
  • A history of obstetric anaesthesia in the late 19th and early 20th century

Debby Banham

  • Early medieval medicine and related subjects
  • Intellectual and cultural history of early medieval England
  • Medieval Latin texts and language
  • Medieval manuscripts
  • Monastic sign language

Lewis Bremner

Global history of science, technology and medicine, including:

  • History of technology
  • History of science and medicine in Asia, especially Japan, China and Korea
  • Transnational, comparative and cross-regional studies of science, technology and medicine
  • Visual culture and the sciences
  • Science and political action (including feminism, anarchism, environmentalism, trade unionism, anti-imperialism)
  • Histories of the movement of scientific texts and instruments between Europe and East Asia

Dissertations previously supervised by Lewis Bremner

  • Karakuri ningyō (mechanised dolls) and the imagination of automation in Edo Japan
  • British interest in the computer processing of Chinese characters
  • Military medicine of the Russo-Japanese War
  • Coal-powered democracy: how energy systems distribute worker power

Sara Caputo

  • Maritime worlds and maritime travel, 18th–19th century, esp. European navies
  • History of medicine, race, and Empire, 18th–19th century
  • European cartography, mapmaking and globemaking, 16th–19th century
  • History of 19th-century surveillance technologies
  • History of exploration and 'discovery'
  • Mediterranean history, 18th–19th century

Dissertations previously supervised by Sara Caputo

  • Disturbances of vision: reframing the sleeping sickness epidemic in early 20th-century Uganda

Jaco de Swart

  • History of 20th-century physics (e.g. particle physics, Cold War, space race)
  • History and philosophy of cosmology (e.g. black holes, dark matter, dark energy)
  • Science and the environment (e.g. contamination, waste, resources)
  • Social and environmental justice in science

Dissertations previously supervised by Jaco de Swart

  • Dark matter and scientific pluralism

Seb Falk

Medieval sciences, especially:

  • Medieval astronomy/astrology and mathematical sciences
  • Medieval and early-modern scientific instruments
  • Manuscripts, texts, diagrams and tables
  • Sciences in medieval literature, culture and religion; monasteries and universities
  • Reception of Greek and Arabic sciences in Christian Europe

Dissertations previously supervised by Seb Falk

  • The International Date Line in medieval Judaism
  • 'Ut est in hac figura': copying images of instruments in Corpus Astronomicum
  • The perfect interval: a mathematical conception of consonance
  • Prophetic medicine and treatment in the medieval Islamic world
  • Albucasis on Urolithiasis: his contributions to the surgical literature and the texts which inspired his writings
  • Allegory or actual? Understanding popular animal representation in the late middle ages
  • Medieval music theory in Western and Byzantine sources
  • Lateran IV and medical practice: ecclesiastical regulation of surgery in 13th-century Europe

Marina Frasca-Spada

History of the philosophy of science; 18th-century studies:

  • Topics in mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science
  • Classical topics in the history of the philosophy of science from Descartes to Kant
  • Text-based work on philosophy classics
  • Argument and persuasive strategies in the history of philosophy: rhetoric and style, philosophical writing and genres
  • Relations between 18th-century philosophy and literature: classical empiricism and the culture of sensibility
  • The history of the book in relation to philosophy and the sciences
  • Related topics in the history of education: learning, teaching and writing for Restoration Cambridge students and dons, or publication by/for women in the 18th century

Dissertations previously supervised by Marina Frasca-Spada

  • Kant's 'I Think': on the self and self-consciousness
  • Interpreting Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
  • Kant's Second Analogy and Newtonian physics
  • The 'I' in language: from Descartes to Herder

Johan Gärdebo

  • American, European and Nordic history of concepts of nature, environment and climate, from the 19th century to the present
  • Political philosophy on state- and nation-building, from 19th century to present
  • History of technology, focusing on industrial transitions and on the evolution of data processing (from manual to automated data gathering) during the 20th century
  • Oral history projects, with a focus on interviewing actors within development studies, diplomatic history, and international technology transfers

Arthur Harris

  • Ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese science, mathematics and medicine
  • General philosophy of science

Dissertations previously supervised by Arthur Harris

  • Public health in Ancient Greece
  • The taste of a stone: literati and lithophagy in late imperial China
  • Divine intervention: representations of Greek deities in illness and healing across Ancient Greek literature and everyday life

Boris Jardine

  • Scientific instruments (the instrument trade; early-modern mathematical instruments; history of the microscope)
  • The material culture of science (including scientific architecture)
  • 'Paper tools' and the scientific book
  • History of scientific collections
  • The history of modern Cambridge science (scientific sites and buildings; the rise of laboratory science; Cambridge collections)
  • Science and politics (science and left-wing politics; science and utopia; science and modernism)

Dissertations previously supervised by Boris Jardine

  • Skins, skeletons, show-cases and the science of life: organising Cambridge's bird room at the turn of the 20th century
  • Characterising collections: on the preservation of old scientific apparatus at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Whipple Museum, Cambridge

Nick Jardine

Historiography of the sciences, early-modern astronomy and cosmology, history of natural history, ideologies of science, history of methods in the sciences:

  • Historiography of the sciences: the founding fathers and mothers (Whewell, Duhem, Sarton, Koyré, Metzger, etc.); polemical uses of history of the sciences; problems of historical interpretation; anachronism; problems of historical explanation and narration; theories of social construction, network formation, mediated exchange of knowledge; cultural history of the sciences; history of science in relation to anthropology, history of the book, cultural geography; etc.
  • Early-modern astronomy and cosmology: the battle of the world-systems; the places of astronomy in early-modern culture; astronomical imagery; etc.
  • History of natural history: cabinets and museums; travelling and collecting; natural history and natural theology; popular natural history; curiosities and monstrosities; etc.
  • Ideologies of science: views on the social and political roles of the sciences, the 'two cultures' controversy, purity and disinterestedness of the sciences, unity of science, etc.
  • Past Western methodologies of the sciences: methods of inquiry and persuasion from Plato and Aristotle to the Second World War

Dissertations previously supervised by Nick Jardine

  • Johannes Kepler's petty insults: invective rhetoric in the Apologia (1622)
  • The a priori in science and Wittgensteinian certainties
  • Rethinking the legacy of J.H. Woodger
  • What's in a name? Heroes and visions in Amazonian ethnobotany
  • Does commitment to aesthetic criteria for theory selection undermine the rationalist picture of scientific practice?
  • Totalising Galvanism: J.W. Ritter and F.W. Schelling's Romantic dialogue on the role of the individual phenomenon within a holistic
  • An educative discipline: Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science and the permeability of disciplinary boundaries in Cambridge HPS, 1945–1965
  • Kant and Hume on the external world – the refutation of idealism: how far is Kant's answer satisfactory to the sceptic?
  • Ex epistulis Philippinensibus: Georg Joseph Kamel SJ (1661–1706) and his correspondence network
  • Naturgeschichte, Naturbeschreibung and the purposiveness of nature in Kant's critical and precritical writings

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira

  • Science, medicine and religion in transnational history
  • History of science, medicine and religion in East Asia, particularly late imperial and modern China
  • History of health and medicine in South America
  • Mind-body medicine
  • Folk healing, traditional medicine and alternative therapies
  • Mental health and psychological disciplines

Dissertations previously supervised by Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira

  • The taste of a stone: literati and lithophagy in late imperial China

Melanie Keene

  • History of popular science, especially 19th century
  • Science and literature
  • Science for children
  • History of education

Dissertations previously supervised by Melanie Keene

  • The promise of CRISPR: a rhetorical analysis of dominant metaphors in an emerging technology
  • Negretti & Zambra's scientific instruments: a new dimension to the Victorian culture of travel
  • How British children's conceptions of science changed throughout the 19th century, examined through a comparative analysis of early and late century periodicals
  • Literature and medicine: Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) as mirror, spotlight, beacon

Miles Kempton

  • Science and the moving image, including television
  • Science and the mass media
  • The life sciences in the twentieth century
  • Zoos and menageries
  • History of wildlife conservation

Dissertations previously supervised by Miles Kempton

  • Pluralism and impartiality in the treatment of climate science in British documentaries
  • Constructing charisma: the pangolin in the British media

Benedikt Löwe

  • Philosophy of mathematics
  • Empirical studies of scientific research or policy practice
  • Metamathematical foundations of mathematics

Dissertations previously supervised by Benedikt Löwe

  • On the foundationality and naturalness of extensions to the Zermelo-Frænkel system of axioms

Tom McClelland

  • Philosophy of cognitive science (consciousness; perception; action; selfhood)
  • Artificial intelligence (artificial consciousness; artificial creativity; ethics of AI)
  • Metaphysics of science (time; causation; structural realism)
  • Philosophy of medicine (medical ethics; philosophy of psychiatry)

Dissertations previously supervised by Tom McClelland

  • Balancing maternal and foetal rights: ethical, legal and medical perspectives on autonomy and protection in prenatal care
  • Epistemology in the age of AI: digital innovations and the re-definition of scientific knowledge
  • Challenges in constructing a mechanistic, causally-informed psychiatry
  • A critical analysis of human-AI coevolution theory: how is Artificial Intelligence impacting society?
  • 'Women's problems': normalisation, disruption and suffering in the dismissal of women's gynaecological pain
  • A semantic void: the creative case against weak AI scientific contribution
  • Beyond current empirical aesthetics: an emergentist account of aesthetic experience
  • Are Nozickian experience machines possible? An enactivist account
  • The producers of an LLM's training data are not co-authors of its output
  • Artificial intelligence and love
  • The cost of death: examining financial inequality in the assisted dying debate
  • Does fear ruin our ability to give informed consent in a medical setting?

Richard McKay

Dissertations examining the history of venereal disease / sexually transmitted infections using the 20th-century records of the Whitechapel Clinic in East London

Dissertations previously supervised by Richard McKay

  • The rollout of HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis in England
  • 'I am confused and distressed and must know for sure one way or another': the experiences of young people attending a London venereal disease clinic, 1960–1971
  • Leather, leadership and loss: the transformation of San Francisco's gay male leather subculture in the age of AIDS
  • Julia and John: defining the 'MTF transsexual' in the medical encounter
  • 'I must know if it is Gonorrhoea before I get married': female patients' voices in the records of a 20th-century venereal disease clinic in London
  • Why after 40 years is there still no AIDS vaccine?
  • Geographies of sexual risk: reimagining migration through an analysis of sexual health research and clinical practice
  • The onto-mythology of essentialism in genetic research about homosexuality
  • Dental dams as a technology of safer sex: lesbians, AIDS and biopolitics
  • Public resistance to polio vaccination in Northern Nigeria
  • The prevention of malaria in colonial Sierra Leone
  • Should the oral polio vaccine theory of the origin of AIDS be considered 'refuted'?

Dmitriy Myelnikov

  • History of biology and medicine since 1900, esp. genetics, molecular biology, microbiology
  • History of biotechnology
  • Animal history in biomedicine and agriculture
  • Science governance and funding post-1945
  • History of science communication, publishing and science-media relations
  • Life sciences and medicine in the Soviet Union
  • History of STM in Ukraine

Dissertations previously supervised by Dmitriy Myelnikov

  • Did the shifting relationship between humans and dogs as a result of WW1/WW2 affect veterinary medicine moving forwards?
  • Gonorrhoea and gonococci: the paradoxical relationship between bacteriological research and clinical observation in the late 19th century
  • From Russia with 'cure': Cold War politics and the British reception of a Soviet vaccine against multiple sclerosis, 1946–1958
  • Exploring DNA profiling in the United Kingdom: construction of the National DNA Database, c.1988–1996
  • The commune and the replicator – conflicting visions of European farming
  • Medical illustration in the 20th century: a feminist discipline in the age of mechanization

Emma Perkins

History of early modern science and technology, especially:

  • Astronomy and cosmology
  • Courtly science and patronage
  • Visual and material culture of science
  • Cartography
  • Books, museums and collections
  • Networks and scientific communication
  • Science and religion

Edwin Rose

  • Global history of natural history and the life sciences, c. 1660–1900
  • History of scientific books, publishing and communication c. 1660–1960, especially the reception, use and materiality of books and their integration with scientific practice
  • History of science and empire, especially Britain
  • History of collecting, information processing and its relationship with material culture in the life, earth and human sciences
  • History of institutions including museums, botanic gardens, universities and their approaches to collecting and relationships with private collections in the 18th and 19th centuries
  • The history of science in Cambridge, including material culture and collections, libraries, books and theories in the life, earth and physical sciences c. 1700–1960
  • History of scientific images in the 18th and 19th centuries
  • History of taxonomy and systematics in natural history

Simon Schaffer

Not supervising in Easter Term 2026

  • Social history of physical sciences
  • History of experimental natural philosophy
  • Astronomical and navigational sciences between 1700 and 1900
  • Sociology of scientific knowledge

Dissertations previously supervised by Simon Schaffer

  • Integrating Algeria through industry: the Saint-Simonians and the French civilising mission in Algeria (1830–1870)
  • The political astronomy of Sawai Jai Singh
  • Newton in the garden: the politics of cultural sites, allegory and iconography
  • Negotiating responsibility: British intellectuals and the Indian famines of the late 19th century
  • Parafiction and the Human Cell Atlas
  • The medic in the machine: final and efficient causes in Hobbes and Descartes
  • A drop in the ocean? An argument for the importance of Irish place and space in George Gabriel Stokes's scientific practice
  • Automated magic: automata and early film at the Egyptian Hall, c.1875–1905
  • 'The impregnable foundations of geometry and arithmetick': Wren's architecture and mathematical science
  • Constructing policy relevance: authorship and lost knowledge in the context of the IPCC
  • The astronomer at the end of the world: communicating scientific authority in Camille Flammarion's fin de siècle fiction
  • The making of the Scottish mechanics' class: reinterpreting the Mechanics' Institutes

Jeremy Schneider

History of early modern science (1400–1800), further including:

  • Earth sciences from antiquity to 1800
  • Fossils, earth history, deep time
  • Natural history and natural philosophy
  • Science and environment: conservation, biodiversity, extinction
  • Scientific images and visual practices
  • Artisanal epistemology, vernacular knowledge
  • Intellectual history: humanism and science, rhetoric and science, classical ideas
  • Material culture: objects, manuscripts, specimens
  • Any work that requires expertise in the following languages: German, Latin, French, Dutch, ancient Greek

Dissertations previously supervised by Jeremy Schneider

  • Georges Cuvier, patronage, and the French Revolution

Anne Secord

  • Natural history, 18th and 19th-century
  • History of scientific observation, 18th and 19th-century
  • Scientific personae

Dissertations previously supervised by Anne Secord

  • Ordering observations in the ornithological registers of Alfred Newton, 1850–60: between 'calendars of nature' and 'phenology'
  • Radical observer: the travels of Joseph Beete Jukes
  • Erasmus Wilson's investigations of 19th-century skin
  • Birds of paradise and collecting Eden
  • Corresponding conviction: the establishment of authority in the letters of James Croll
  • Hooker and the Himalayas

Jim Secord

  • Social history of science since 1750, life and earth sciences
  • Public science from the French Revolution to the First World War, esp. in Britain, France and the United States: exhibitions, zoos, education, museums, scientific architecture, careers, textbooks, public lecturing, mechanics institutes, children's science, images of the scientist, government support for science, science in periodicals and newspapers
  • Scientific books, publishing and history of science communication (mostly British, 1790–1960): histories of individual firms (e.g. Cambridge University Press, Penguin), changing nature of authorship, history of the scientific article, history of scientific libraries, development of scientific periodicals, techniques for scientific illustration and other aspects of production
  • Science and literature, esp. Romantic and early Victorian: literary readings of scientific works, travel literature, science and the novel, autobiography
  • Religion and science in the 19th century: conversion experiences, denominational responses to science (e.g. early geology, astronomy, cosmology), Darwinian debates, atheism and science
  • History of earth sciences, 18th century to present: early theories of the earth, mineral collecting and prospecting, geological mapping, origins of geological timescale, debates about biblical flood, volcanoes, debates about uniformity and catastrophe, government surveys, oceanographic exploration, reception of continental drift, history of vertebrate and invertebrate palaeontology, history of public attitudes to geology
  • Imperialism and science (mostly 19th century): exploration, expeditions, surveys, botanical gardens, geological and natural history surveys, etc; science and race; science and public support for empire; imperial expositions and fairs; science, religion and empire, geography and empire

Dissertations previously supervised by Jim Secord

  • The memorialisation of Down House: experience, scientific heritage and national identity
  • 'Not merely teaching but education': Girton women, educational institutions and the teaching profession, c.1869–1882
  • Darwin and Islam in the same sentence: the historiography of Darwinism in Islamic contexts in the English-speaking world
  • Attention, please! Recovering working-class audience experiences at popular science lectures in Britain, 1850–1900
  • The reception of Robert Young's 'Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century' (1970)
  • The races of cattle: acclimatization and classification between India and Britain
  • The constituency of reason: Michael Foster and science in parliamentary politics
  • Riding the Iguanodon to immortality: discovery in 19th-century geology
  • The rhetoric, media and literary culture of late 19th-century anti-vaccination campaign periodicals and publications
  • Michael Angelo Garvey's 'Silent Revolution': technology, education and the future from the post-1848 'moment'
  • Lost world fiction and the domestication of the dinosaur, 1880–1914
  • Thomas Carlyle and the 'hero as "man of science"' in the mechanical age

Liba Taub

History of scientific instruments and material culture of science; early (particularly ancient Greek and Roman) science:

  • Early (particularly ancient Greek and Roman) science
    • Especially physics, cosmology, astronomy, harmonics, meteorology, geography, ethnography, agriculture
    • Styles of communicating scientific ideas and methods
    • The engagement of 19th- and 20th-century scientists with the ancients (e.g. Erwin Schroedinger's Nature and the Greeks)
  • History of scientific instruments
    • Material culture of science, particularly focused on items held in the Whipple collection (over 7000 objects/possible topics!)
    • The provenance of items purchased by Robert Whipple himself

Dissertations previously supervised by Liba Taub

  • Tycho Brahe's architectural images of his observatories on the island of Hven
  • 'Materials for a history of science in Cambridge': meanings of collections in the 1944 scientific instrument exhibition at the University of Cambridge
  • Reconsidering the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems
  • Astrolabes in context: a reappraisal of medieval astronomical instruments
  • An early 19th-century 'museum microscope' and cultures of collecting
  • Natural history of sale: Maison Deyrolle and its role in the 19th-century natural history community
  • Pedagogy and translation of didactic verse in scientific/medical texts to and from the Islamicate world (9th–12th century)
  • A Korean astronomical screen at the Whipple Museum: parsing a composite cosmography
  • Physics demonstration apparatus in textbooks and trade literature
  • Making scientific women: practical chemistry instruction for women at Cambridge, 1890–1916
  • 'The knowledge of antiquity and the pursuit of new discoveries' in Edward Sherburne's The Sphere of Marcus Manilius Made an English Poem: with Annotations and an Astronomical Appendix (1675)