University of Kent

Post-Doc, School of History

Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology

About

Don Leggett works in the field of British cultural history with special focus on science and technology. He also works on the Royal Navy and identity politics, and the relationship between engineering, literature and intellectual values in early twentieth-century America.

He holds degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Kent, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2009. He has held fellowships at the National Maritime Museum (2009) and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress (2008) as a British Council fellow. He is currently working on a monograph examining authority and technology in the nineteenth-century Royal Navy.

In 2010 Don was awarded the Singer Prize of the British Society for the History of Science for his article on a comparative history approach to replication in science studies. This will appear as ‘Replication, Re-Placing and Naval Science in Comparative Context, c.1868-1903’ in the British Journal for the History of Science.

His research has also examined science and religion, engineering and rhetoric, and the culture of naval science in America. He has a strong interest in naval and maritime history, and is co-editor with Richard Dunn of Re-Inventing the Ship: Science, Technology and the Maritime World, 1800-1914 (Ashgate, 2012), an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explore contexts of and responses to the material transformation of the ship. He is also beginning research that examines the institutionalisation and enculturalisation of engineering in the British state from the 1880s to 1945.

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