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Ratcliff joins GSLIS as a Postdoctoral Fellow

September 1, 2009

This fall, GSLIS welcomes Dr. Jessica Ratcliff as the new Information in Society postdoctoral fellow. Information in Society is a specialization within the doctoral program. It is part of a broader initiative to enrich our school's research focus on the societal impacts of information and information technologies and is supported by a preparing future faculty grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Professor Dan Schiller and Associate Dean and Professor Linda C. Smith are co-PIs on the IMLS grant.

Ratcliff's research focuses on science, technology and the state in Britain and the former British Empire. She recently published a book about government astronomy in nineteenth-century Britain (The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Pickering and Chatto, 2008). She has also written on inventors, calculating machines, and state patronage in early modern England (e.g. "Samuel Morland and His Calculating Machines c.1666: the early career of a courtier inventor in Restoration London", BJHS, June 2007).

Her undergraduate degrees are in cognitive and computer science, and she worked as a computer programmer before her graduate studies. In 2001 she received a M.Sc. in the history of scientific instruments from the University of Oxford. In 2006 she received a D.Phil. in history from the University of Oxford. Since then she has been a lecturer and visiting scholar at the Stevens Institute of Technology, the Australian National University, Cornell University, and, most recently, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. She has taught introductory history of science courses as well as seminars on the history of computing and on science and empire in India. Other interests include the history of scientific instruments, history of science museums, and humanities computing.

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