Dr Ian Hesketh

ARC Future Fellow

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

+61 7 334 67413

i.hesketh@uq.edu.au

Researcher biography

BA (Okanagan University College, Kelowna, BC), MA, PhD (York University, Toronto)

Ian Hesketh is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Most broadly, his research considers the relationship between history, science, and religion with a focus on nineteenth-century Britain. He is currently working on a large-scale history of the evolutionary epic. In 2017 he was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship for a project entitled "The Place of History in Science: Reassessing the Darwinian Revolution." His latest book, Victorian Jesus, was published in October 2017.

A listing of Ian Hesketh's engagement activities can be found here.

Featured projects	Duration
The place of history in science: reassessing the Darwinian revolution ARC Future Fellowship	2017–2021
Writing History in the Age of the Anthropocene: The Past and Future of Big History (2016–2017) UQ Foundation	2016

PhD and MPhil Supervision

View current and completed supervisions on UQ Researchers.

Find out more information on how to apply for a Research Higher Degree (MPhil or PhD). For all enquiries regarding research supervision, please contact us.

Publications

Books (3)

Book Chapters (6)

Journal Articles (24)

Books

Hesketh, Ian Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, religion, and the cultural significance of anonymity. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Hesketh, Ian The science of history in Victorian Britain: making the past speak. London United Kingdom: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.

Hesketh, Ian Of apes and ancestors : evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford debate. Toronoto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Book Chapters

Hesketh, Ian (2019). From Copernicus to Darwin to you: history and the meaning(s) of evolution. In Bernard Lightman (Ed.), Rethinking history, science, and religion: an exploration of conflict and the complexity principle (pp. 191-205) Pittsburgh, PA, United States: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Hesketh, Ian (2019). Evolution, ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869-1875. In Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman and Richard England (Ed.), The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880): intellectual life in mid-Victorian England (pp. 185-203) Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Hesketh, Ian (2018). The gendering of history. In Karin Sellberg (Ed.), Gender: time (pp. 103-115) Farmington Hills, MI United States: Macmillan Reference USA/Gale Group Thomson Learning.

Hesketh, Ian (2018). The future evolution of "Man". In Historicizing humans: deep time, evolution, and race in nineteenth-century British sciences (pp. 193-217) Pittsburgh, PA USA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Hesketh, Ian (2015). Fanatical hatred or brotherly love? rethinking E. A. Freeman's eud with J. A. Froude. In G. A. Bremner and Jonathan Conlin (Ed.), Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics (pp. 255-272) Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Hesketh, Ian (2013). Frederick Temple and the essays and reviews controversy. In Patrick Derham (Ed.), Cultural Olympians: Rugby School's intellectual and spiritual leaders (pp. 123-136) London: University of Buckingham Press.

Journal Articles

Hesketh, Ian (2019) Technologies of the Scientific Self: John Tyndall and His Journal. Isis, 110 3: 460-482. doi:10.1086/704672

Hesketh, Ian (2018) John Robert Seeley, natural religion, and the Victorian conflict between science and religion. Journal of the History of Ideas, 79 2: 309-329. doi:10.1353/jhi.2018.0018

Hesketh, Ian (2018) Gillian Beer. Alice in space: the sideways Victorian world of Lewis Carroll. Isis, 109 1: 189-191.

Hesketh, Ian (2017) The evolutionary epic. Victorian Review, 41 2: 35-39. doi:10.1353/vcr.2015.0014

Hesketh, Ian (2016) Victorian literature and the physics of the imponderable. Isis, 107 4: 868-869.

Harrison, Peter and Hesketh, Ian (2016) Introduction: evolution and historical explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58 1-7. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.010

Hesketh, Ian (2016) Counterfactuals and history: contingency and convergence in histories of science and life. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C :Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58 41-48. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.015

Hesketh, Ian (2015) Review of James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet. Irish Studies Review, 23 3: 365-367. doi:10.1080/09670882.2015.1051763

Hesketh, Ian (2015) On Historical Distance by Mark Salber Phillips (review). Histoire sociale/Social history, 47 96: 333-335. doi:10.1353/his.2015.0009

Hesketh, Ian (2015) A good Darwinian? Winwood Reade and the making of a late Victorian evolutionary epic. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 51 44-52. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.01.013

Hesketh, Ian and Peden, Knox (2015) The Aesthetics of Scale. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 9 2: 169-175. doi:10.1163/18722636-12341298

Hesketh, Ian (2015) The recurrence of the evolutionary epic. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 9 2: 196-219. doi:10.1163/18722636-12341300

Hesketh, Ian (2014) The story of Big History. History of the Present, 4 2: 171-202. doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0171

Hesketh, Ian (2014) Darwinian we are not: counterfactualism as the natural course of history. History and Theory, 53 2: 295-303. doi:10.1111/hith.10712

Hesketh, Ian (2014) "History is past politics, and politics present history': who said it?. Notes and Queries, 61 1: 105-108. doi:10.1093/notesj/gjt244

Hesketh, Ian (2012) Edward Adams, liberal epic: the Victorian practice of history from Gibbon to Churchill. Journal of British Studies, 51 3: 750-752. doi:10.1086/665393

Hesketh, Ian (2012) Review - Theodore Koditschek, liberalism, imperialism, and the historical imagination: nineteenth-century visions of a greater Britain. Victorian Review, 38 2: .

Hesketh, Ian (2012) Behold the (Anonymous) man: J. R. Seeley and Ecce Homo. Victorian Review, 38 1: 93-112.

Hesketh, Ian (2011) Weapons of another kind: Henry Thomas Buckle and the case of Thomas Pooley. Left History, 15 1: 87-110.

Hesketh, Ian (2011) Writing history in Macaulay’s Shadow: J.R. Seeley, E.A. Freeman, and the audience for scientific history in late Victorian Britain. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 22 2: 30-56. doi:10.7202/1008977ar

Hesketh, Ian (2011) The remains of the Freeman–Froude controversy: the religious dimension. Canadian Society of Church History, 211-223.

Hesketh, Ian (2010) Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent. Canadian Journal of History, 45 3: 621-622.

Hesketh, Ian (2008) Diagnosing Froude's disease: boundary work and the discipline of history in late-Victorian Britain. History and Theory, 47 3: 373-395. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00460.x

Hesketh, Ian (2008) Frontiers of history: historical inquiry in the twentieth century. Canadian Journal of History, 43 1: 209-211.

Areas of research

Intellectual and Literary History