Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University (Toronto, Canada), where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society’s flagship journal, Isis. Lightman obtained his PhD in the History of Ideas at Brandeis University in 1979. He taught at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada) and the University of Oregon before coming to York University in 1987. His research focuses on the cultural history of Victorian science, including the rise of unbelief and science and religion in the popularization of science. His Origins of Agnosticism (Johns Hopkins, 1987) has become the standard work on the history of agnosticism. Lightman is general editor of a monograph series titled "Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century," published by Pickering and Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall. Lightman was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada last November.
Recent selected publications
- Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences. Co-edited with Aileen Fyfe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The ‘Darwinians’ and Their Critics. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Burlington, Vermont, USA; Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009.
- Christian Evolutionists in the United States, 1860-1900. Journal of Cambridge Studies 4, No. 4 (December 2009), 14-22.
- Darwin and the Popularization of Evolution. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64, No. 1 (March 2010), 5-24.
- Science and Culture. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 12-42.
- The Many Lives of Charles Darwin: Biographies and the Definitive Evolutionist. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64 (December 2010), 339-358.
- Unbelief. Science and Religion around the World: Historical Perspectives. Ed. John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 252-277.
- Science and the Public. Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science. Ed. Peter Harrison, Ronald Numbers, and Michael Shank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 337-375.
- Refashioning the Spaces of London Science: Elite Epistemes in the Nineteenth Century. Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science: Ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 25-50.
- Victorian Science and Popular Visual Culture. Guest Editor. Special Issue of Early Popular Visual Culture 10, No. 1 (February 2012).