Knowledges and Technologies

The Group’s work in this area investigates the significance of place and space in the building of technological and knowledge formations. It also seeks to understand the spatial consequences of particular techno-scientific ideas and agendas. Recent and current work has focused on the role of institutional sites in the building of scientific knowledge and practice, on the histories of the geographical discipline, on the political geographies of natural and physical science and environmental science policy in various national contexts, and on early modern knowledge communities.

Robert Mayhew has written extensively on the history of geography, including his Enlightenment Geography, published in 2000. A new book, about Malthus and the history of Malthusian ideas about the environment, is due out from Harvard University Press in 2014.

Paul Glennie, with Professor Nigel Thrift, produced a pathbreaking monograph – Shaping the Day (Oxford, 2009) – about clock time and time consciousness in late medieval and early modern England.

Merle Patchett's AHRC-funded PhD research critically examined the craft worlds and knowledge-practices of taxidermists, past and present, and their material culture of animal remains in order to re-think and re-present matter(s) of life and death and histories of human-animal relation. This research drew on and developed research arguments and approaches originating in cultural and historical geography, the history of science and the emerging field of animal studies. Merle has published on this research widely in international peer-reviewed journals and is currently preparing to publish this research in full as a monograph entitled The Taxidermist's Apprentice: On the Craft of Taxidermy and Histories of Human-Animal Relation.

Yvonne Sherratt has written Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press 2013, which examines the role of knowledge in pernicious political regimes. It has received broad acclaim, described by John Gray in the Independent where it was book of the week, as `a fascinating, disturbing and necessary book'. It has been translated into several languages so far, including Italian, Korean, Turkish, Russian, Japanese and Spanish.