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You have been listening to Surekha Davies read her original essay, “Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?” Find this and other monstrous musings in A Time Of Monsters, a 2025 special issue of Contingent Magazine.
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Dr. Surekha Davies is a British historian of science with a BA and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press), won the Journal of the History of Ideas’ Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, Reactor, Pasts Imperfect, Nature, Science, and elsewhere. She writes a free newsletter, Strange and Wondrous: Notes From a Science Historian. To learn more, please visit www.surekhadavies.org.