About me

What’s happening at the moment…

Since 2020 I am based as a postdoc at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Exhibiting “Masterpieces of Science and Technology” it is the world’s largest museum of science and technology with a collection of over 100,000 objects. As part of the museum’s research institute and a team of five, I am working on a BMBF-funded project on the history of AI (artificial intelligence) in Germany. Specifically, I focus on the relationship between AI research and the cognitive sciences.

Previously…

Between 2016 and 2019 I worked collaboratively with the British Library and the University of Leeds. My project focused on the archive of the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1920-2004).

The King’s Library inside the British Library. © David Baron 2013.

At the British Library I was based in the Politics and Public Life section of the Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts department. “Contemporary” here refers to any material post-1950. You can head over to the Library’s website to take a look at my case study, as part of which the above video was filmed.

At Leeds, I was supervised by Prof Greg Radick (see here for his personal website) and part of the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science. My university profile includes similar information to my personal website, but still – feel free to check it out!

Before moving to the UK I spent my life as an undergraduate and graduate student at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. There I worked on the Dutch Nobel Laureate Peter Debye (1884-1966) and his time at the Physics Institute of the University of Leipzig. Other work includes studies of representation and knowledge transmission in eighteenth-century scientific travel literature (broadly defined), like my chapter on Cornelius de Pauw and the Americas.

Misc…

I am a member of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), and the German museums association (Deutscher Museumsbund).

I have also worked as an Education Volunteer at the London Canal Museum.