Academic Profile

I’m in the final year of my PhD, working on a thesis entitled: “Thoroughly English: County Natural History, c. 1660-1720”. I received both my BA in History (2006) and MA in the Social History of Medicine (2007) from the University of Warwick- the latter with funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Teaching (2011-2)

Contributor and Seminar tutor for the core module for second year undergraduates, The European World, 1500-1720 

Contributor and Seminar tutor for an optional module for second year undergraduates, Politics, Literature and Ideas in Stuart England, c. 1600-1715

Tutor for Academic Skills Sessions for postgraduates in the Centre for the History of Medicine

Organisational responsibilities (2011-2)

Network Administrator (0.26FTE), Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Forum, 2011-2013

Director, British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, January 2012

Postgraduate representative, British Society for the History of Science Programmes Committee, 2011-2

Coordinator, Being Human: Medicine and the Human Sciences research network and events (IAS Funded)

Co-organiser, Early Modern Seminar, 2011-12 Series (with Dr Rosa Salzberg)

My research

The County Natural History was a short-lived genre of writing which was unique to England. The first was The County Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677), by Robert Plot. The last, written by John Morton, was of Northamptonshire (1712). These works, along with four other printed books and numerous manuscript volumes which were circulated among contemporaries through the Royal Society, Bodleian library, and private correspondence networks, shared a remarkably wide topical outlook. The chapter titles from of Oxfordshire are perhaps the best illustration of the extents of their coverage: of the heavens, waters, earths, stones, formed stones, plants, brutes, men and women, arts and antiquities.

The changing foci of local history in the latter seventeenth-century has recently become a topic of some debate, with two historians in particular suggesting avenues of enquiry which touch on county natural histories. Alix Cooper, in her work on Germanic floras, suggests that the investigation of local nature was undertaken as a response to the differences which existed across the world- so to use her terminology the exotic was a spur to the investigation of the indigenous. Jan Broadway, taking a different tack, situates local investigation in a long tradition of local study which was deeply embedded in English gentry culture- suggesting that county natural history was another variant of a tradition that stretched back to the ninth century.

My research aims to combine these two methodological preconceptions. The intellectual foundations for an expansion of local study to include both 'nature and the arts' came from the epistemic shift occasioned by the discovery of the new world. However the manner in which this study was researched, discussed and published was also influenced extensively by pre-existing traditions of local history in England.

Recent and Forthcoming Conference Papers

forthcoming- Antiquarian Science: The county natural history in latter seventeenth century England, Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), April 2012

“Searching into Natural Knowledge” in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, 1660-1730, Centre for the History of Medicine Work in Progress, University of Warwick, May 2011

County Natural Histories: General Knowledge in Local Space?, British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference, University of Manchester, January 2011

D dot C dot Beck at warwick dot ac dot uk