Francis Newman

Research Interests: Histories of science, medicine, and technology in East Asia; environmental history; science and colonialism; Qing history; Taiwan studies.

Francis is a PhD candidate in history of science. His work draws together histories of the environment, the physical sciences, and medicine in the context of encounter, exchange, colonial violence, and epistemic resistance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Asia. His dissertation examines the connections between body and environment in late Qing Taiwan, highlighting how the multitude of perspectives on this fundamental relationship shaped, and were shaped by, the social connections and power dynamics between different colonist, settler, and Indigenous groups on the island.

He also has interests in  the social history of timekeeping, and in the European colonial project of ‘medical meteorology’.  In addition, he has published on how science diplomacy involving the early PRC informed contemporary ideologies of science in Britain.

After initially training in physics, he worked in science communication and in museums of technology and industrial heritage before turning toward history of science. Partly as a consequence, he also has an abiding interest in how museums and innovative digital media can support, shape, and connect historical research, science policy, and public history.

Francis’ writing has been recognized with the FHHMLS Graduate Student Essay Award (2022), the University of Cambridge’s Annita McConnell Prize (2020), and as runner-up in the Notes and Records Essay Award (2021). He has held visiting fellowships at National Taiwan University and at the National Central Library, Taipei, and his work has been supported by the Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center. He was also a co-curator of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments’ exhibition Measuring Difference, which won the 2025 BSHS Exhibiting Excellence Prize.

Publications:

‘Scientific ideologies on the move: Sino-British exchanges, scientific freedoms, and the governance of science in Britain, 1961-1966’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal for the History of Science (2021). Published ahead of print, at https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0055

‘The Ambiguities of a Sundial’, in J. Nall and B. Jardine, eds, Materials for the History of Science (Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 2022)

Previous Degrees:

M.Phys. (Hons) Physics, University of St Andrews
M.Phil., History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, University of Cambridge