I was glad to join the History Department on 1 October after receiving an NWO PhDs in the Humanities grant for my project “’Advancing Microscopy’: New Media and Citizen Microscopists in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America”.
In the nineteenth century, microscopy was immensely popular with amateurs and professionals in various scientific fields.
At the same time, a wealth of journals and popular science books on microscopy became available, which were widely circulated among microscopists and invited them to contribute their observations. My research investigates how nineteenth-century media enabled amateur and professional microscopists to collaborate. Moreover, building on the nineteenth-century model of collaboration, I will invite present-day citizen scientists to contribute to an online analysis of nineteenth-century microscopy publications. My research is supervised by Cyrus Mody and Raf de Bont.
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Journalism and a Research MSc in Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology, which I obtained here at Maastricht University. Now I am excited to continue my research at FASoS and looking forward to getting to know those of you I haven’t met yet!