I am a historian of science and technology, with a focus on colonial South Asia and Japan. I have worked on several projects to date, examining topics in the history of Earth and environmental sciences, women in STEM and the history of telecommunications. This research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the European Research Council, the German Research Foundation (DFG), CHANSE: Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. I completed my undergraduate and graduate education at the Universities of Tokyo (BA and MA in Asian Area Studies) and Heidelberg (PhD in Modern History), after which I spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher in Oxford and Heidelberg. In 2023, I joined the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, where I currently work as Senior 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 (Manchester University Press, 2025) is the outcome of the project “Archives of the Earth: Fossils, Science and Historical Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India,” funded by the German Research Council. It is also available in an open-access format here.
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 