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Surekha Davies

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.

Podcast
A richly illustrated manuscript world map covered in animals, people, monsters, and other details.

Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian? — audio

By Surekha Davies | January 13, 2026

A historian who pays full attention to their sources can’t help but be transformed into a monster…

A richly illustrated manuscript world map covered in animals, people, monsters, and other details.
Shorts

Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?

By Surekha Davies | December 31, 2025

A historian who pays full attention to their sources can’t help but be transformed into a monster…

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