My current book project is called The Paper Makers: How and Everyday Material Transformed Early Modern Science. I argue that print culture gave shape to the early history of scientific instrumentation in England, in the period 1550–1700. The book is a collective biography of instrument makers, from the Flemish emigre Thomas Gemini to the craftsman-scholar Joseph Moxon – and it is also a celebration of the flexibility, fragility and peculiar strength of paper itself.

My other papers and projects include:

• Tools of Knowledge: an AHRC-funded collaborative project to investigate the history of scientific instrument making in Britain, 1550–1900

• How Collections End: a study of the anti-theory of collecting, with contributions from a wide range of disciplines and different national contexts

• The Lost Museums of Cambridge Science: an investigation of the cultures of collecting in Cambridge in the 19th century, centred on the complex and contested city-centre ‘New Museums Site’

• The Total Archive: a conference and multiple publications (LIMN, HSS) on the idea of a ‘complete’ collection

• Fake Scientific Instruments: a curatorial and scholarly study of a surprising problem in historical science collections

• Science and aesthetics: an ongoing research project on the interrelation of modern techno-science and the avant-garde

  • ‘In Media Res’ (for the Human Cell Atlas)

  • On Mass-Observation

  • ‘Made Real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration’

  • On Science Fiction and the politics of planning (PDF)

  • ‘The camera lucida and the technologies of imitation’ (PDF) (for the David Hockney exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum)