Katharine Anderson

Katharine Anderson is a historian of science (PhD Northwestern, 1995) who has been on faculty in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto since 1996, after a postdoc in HPS department at Cambridge. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard and University of British Columbia, and has served as book review editor for Isis. Her scholarly interests include the history of weather and climate, Victorian scientific exploration narratives, and the present and future of science museums. She supervises graduate students through graduate programs in STS, Humanities, and History. Her current research project examines the oceans in the early twentieth century as a site of scientific research. It explores several expeditions of the inter-war period to understand the place of the oceans in the development of scientific practices and disciplines, asking how ideas about the oceans shaped and were shaped by the technological, political, and cultural shifts after World War I. In addition to her historical studies, she is engaged in an ethnographic study of the re-building of the Canadian Science and Technology Museum (2015–2017) in Ottawa that considers the changing role of artifacts in the contemporary museum.