I am a historian of science, technology and media, which I study through a combination of global and micro-history approaches. Most of my research has focused on colonial South Asia, the British Empire and Japan. I have worked on several projects to date, exploring the intersections of media and telecommunications, the history of Earth and environmental sciences and the history of women in science. After completing my education at the Universities of Tokyo (BA and MA in Asian Area Studies) and Heidelberg (PhD in History), I spent several years as a researcher at the Universities of Oxford and Heidelberg. In January 2023, I joined the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine as Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
My first book, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830-1900, was published with Oxford University Press in 2016 and received the American Historical Association’s 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world. A second book, Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), was co-authored with colleagues at the University of Oxford, as part of the ERC-funded research project “Diseases of Modern Life” (2014-2019). A co-edited volume (with Irina Nastasă-Matei), Negotiating In/Visibility: Women, Science, Engineering and Medicine in the Twentieth Century, was published with Manchester University Press in 2025. It is also available in an open-access format here.
I am currently writing another monograph tentatively titled Archives of the Earth: Fossils, Science and Historical Imaginaries in the Twentieth Century, based on research funded by the German Research Foundation and the John Rylands Research Institute. This is a study of the global entanglements of Earth sciences, which traces connections between India, Britain, Germany, the US and Japan, paying particular attention to the role of women in the making and institutionalization of scientific knowledge. Between November 2022 and January 2023, I also acted as Project Leader for the CHANSE-funded ‘Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Public Health and Science Communication in the 20th and 21st Centuries,’ which brought together partners at British, Polish and Romanian institutions.
I am passionate about translation, across languages, writing genres and registers of presentation. When I have time, I translate Japanese scholarship into English, write stories about history for younger audiences and work with artists to find new and exciting ways to bring historical research to a wider public. You can read about this and more in the sections above. My institutional profile is here. Thank you for stopping by!
AMELIA BONEA 