I am a historian working at the intersections of science, technology, medicine and media, which I study through a combination of global and micro-history approaches. Most of my work has focused on colonial South Asia, Victorian Britain and the British Empire, but I also have a secondary research interest in the modern history of Japan. After completing my education at the Universities of Tokyo (BA and MA) and Heidelberg (PhD), I spent several years working 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 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world from the American Historical Association. 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).
I am currently writing another monograph tentatively titled “Archives of the Earth: Fossils, Science and Historical Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India”, based on research funded by the German Research Foundation. This is a study of the global entanglements of paleontology in twentieth-century South Asia, which traces connections to Britain, Germany, the US and Japan, and documents the hidden women who were involved in the making and institutionalization of paleoscientific knowledge. Since November 2022, I am also leading a CHANSE-funded project on ‘Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Public Health and Science Communication in the 20th and 21st Centuries,’ which brings 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 all this and more in the sections above. My institutional profile is here. For those of you who read Romanian–my first language–here is an interview with me in a local newspaper, which also features a badly cropped photograph. Thanks for stopping by!
AMELIA BONEA 