IASH has great pleasure in welcoming Dr James Lancaster, who started with us on 1 October as our new UQ Postdoctoral Fellow. James was awarded his PhD in 2015 from the Warburg Institute at the University of London. Since then, he has been a teaching fellow in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a course leader and online tutor in their International Programmes.
As a board member of the Oxford Francis Bacon project, James has been responsible for editing Book IX of the De augmentis scientiarum, as well as compiling the most comprehensive bibliography to date of editions of, and secondary sources on, Francis Bacon’s works. His publications include: ‘The Semantic Structure of Evolutionary Biology as an Argument Against Intelligent Design’ in Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science; ‘Natural Knowledge as a Propaedeutic to Self-Betterment: Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Natural History’ in Early Science and Medicine; and ‘Natural Histories of Religion: A (Baconian) “Science”?’ in Perspectives on Science. With Guido Giglioni, he has an edited volume, Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, published in April this year.
The project that James will be working on during his fellowship is “’Religiosa insania’: The Pathologization of Religion in Early Modern England.” The project aims to investigate the specific manner in which religion became the subject of medical attention in seventeenth-century England and will examine a diverse body of English texts.
