Dr Emma Chartreuse Spary

After spending my undergraduate and early graduate years at Newnham College, Cambridge, I completed my Ph.D. at Girton College while holding a Research Fellowship there, then moved to a Research Fellowship in the Department of History at the University of Warwick in 1995. I was appointed Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 1998, and after a career break for family reasons, I joined the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL in 2006. I have held my current post at the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge since October 2010.

My publications include a monograph on the history of French natural history in the eighteenth century, Utopia's Garden (2000), and a second monograph, Eating the Enlightenment, is due to be published in 2012. I have jointly edited three books of collected essays. In the pipeline are another monograph on the early history of French alimentary sciences, as well as a couple of journal special issues which I am editing alone or in company.

My research interests cover the history of natural history, medicine, chemistry and agriculture in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly France, but for various projects I have ventured into different areas of the world or of knowledge, from the Netherlands to the Mascarenes, from shell-collecting to rat-eating! I consider myself an historian of knowledge in all its various forms.