Charlotte Sleigh

Charlotte Sleigh is Reader in History of Science at the University of Kent and Director of the Centre for the History of the Sciences. She is co-director of the MSc programme Science, Communication and Society.

Most commented posts

  1. Decolonizing the teaching of HSTM — 2 comments
  2. Whewell and the coining of ‘scientist’ in the Quarterly Review — 2 comments
  3. How I came to study Science Communication and do research on Extinction Rebellion — 2 comments
  4. Science criticism, or, what is this thing about science called? — 2 comments
  5. Food science: then and now — 1 comment

Author's posts

Sep 23

How I came to study Science Communication and do research on Extinction Rebellion

Student Anna Fry introduces her MA Science Communication dissertation on Extinction Rebellion Having struggled through the first year of a Biology degree I was hit with the realisation that, while I had a love of science, the lengthy lab sessions were simply not my thing. Fast forward a few years and one History degree, I …

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Jul 26

Decolonizing the teaching of HSTM

The need to decolonize history of science, technology and medicine has become ever more obvious and pressing over the past generation.  When I was studying in the 1990s, there was a strong wave of scholarship critiquing the hegemony (colonial, racial, masculinist) inherent in the making of much science.  Londa Schiebinger and early Donna Haraway come …

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Apr 21

Archiving from Below: Parenthood, Mortality and the Historian’s Dilemma

I hesitate at gurning maw of the industrial paper compacter, suffering an existential crisis. I’m at the council tip, clearing out my children’s school exercise books.  There’s too many of them and they are cluttering up the house. I’m at the other end of the historian’s telescope; I’m making decisions about archiving—or not.  And it’s …

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Feb 10

Dinosaurs in the Garden of England

Together with the Kent Animal Humanities Network, CHOTS looks forward to welcoming Dr Brian Noble of Dalhousie University, Canada.  Dr Noble will participate in a number of informal seminars as well as giving the annual H. G. Wells lecture for 2017: “Good Mothers” and “King Tyrants” in the Mesozoic: An Anthropology of Dinosaur Science and …

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Sep 28

Food science: then and now

Having looked at a huge range of universities and the courses on offer I decided to apply for the MSc Science Communication and Society at the University of Kent. I chose this particular course as it offered an opportunity to study a combination of Biosciences and History modules allowing me to gain a fantastic insight …

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Sep 27

Wunderkammer Autumn 2016

Here are this term’s Wunderkammer sessions. We’ll be discussing the History Manifesto, SciArt, early-modern globalisation, transhumanism and the history of peer review. We meet every other Tuesday, from 17.30-19.00, in the Unicorn pub, Canterbury. Full details on the pdf wunderkammer_autumn_2016

Apr 12

How to give a conference presentation

  Recent KentCHOTS graduate Dr Alice White (@HistorianAlice) gives her advice on how to give an academic talk in this short, downloadable leaflet.

Oct 27

The way things go: science and art

I heard more spontaneous conversations today about science than I have ever heard in any exhibition anywhere. ‘Why are those rings rolling uphill?’ ‘Why is that water burning?’ ‘What will happen when the balloon fills?’ I was not at a science exhibition, but at the Turner Contemporary Gallery’s new show, Risk.  The piece I was …

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Apr 09

Whewell and the coining of ‘scientist’ in the Quarterly Review

[William Whewell] ‘On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville’. Quarterly Review vol. LI, no. CI, March 1834, pp. 54-68. This is the full text of the article in which Whewell discusses the BAAS coinage of ‘scientist’, scanned in from the original.  It includes the alternative (presumably not very serious) suggestion of ‘nature-poker’ …

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Feb 06

Science criticism, or, what is this thing about science called?

When I’m talking to a new group of students, I frequently find myself fumbling for the word that will briefly capture the realm of scholarship on which I draw: a sort of super-league that includes Beer, Collins, Daston, Latour, MacKenzie, Haraway, Schaffer, Shapin.  I find myself calling on flabby phrases like ‘historians and anthropologists and …

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