Jonathan R. Topham

Prof. Jonathan R. Topham is a Professor of History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. He studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and History at the University of Lancaster, and prior to taking up his current post he taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield. He was for some years one of the editors of the "Correspondence of Charles Darwin".

His books relate mainly to the history of science in Britain in the decades just preceding the Victorian age. In particular, they explore how the sciences changed as books became mass produced, as well as how the connections between the sciences and Christianity developed in the process. These themes form the basis for his major work "Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age" (Chicago University Press, 2022), which provides a powerful reimagining of the world in which a young Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution.

Prof. Topham has co-authored and co-edited a number of other books, including "Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities" (Chicago University Press, 2020), "Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature" (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and "Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media" (Ashgate, 2004), as well as two volumes of the "Correspondence of Charles Darwin" (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 1999).