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Dr Rebekah Higgitt is the Principal Curator of Science.
Rebekah joined the department in August 2020. She is a historian of science who has published widely on British science from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. She is interested in the representation of science in images, museums and literature; in the relationships between science, institutions and wider society; and in the makers, users and ‘lives’ of scientific instruments.
After undertaking a PhD at Imperial College London, on nineteenth-century biographies and biographers of Isaac Newton, Rebekah was an ESRC-funded postdoctoral research associate at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Geography. There she researched the histories and geographies of the peripatetic British Association for the Advancement of Science 1831-1931.
From 2008 to 2013, Rebekah was Curator of History of Science at the National Maritime Museum, with responsibility for the history and heritage of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and the museum’s astronomy collections. There she worked on displays about the transit of Venus and history of solar observation and the large temporary exhibitions Royal River (2012) and Ships, Clocks and Stars (2014). Since then, and before joining NMS, Rebekah was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent, where she supervised PhD students and taught modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level on history of science; science, technology and empire; science and religion; science and satire; science communication; and science, museums and material culture.
In 2010-2015 Rebekah was a Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded project on the British Board of Longitude, 1714-1828. This research supported the international exhibition, Ships, Clocks and Stars as well as public events and publications aimed at academic and general audiences. While at Kent, from 2017-2020, Rebekah was Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project, Metropolitan Science: Places, Objects and Cultures of Practice and Knowledge in London, 1600-1800, in partnership with the Science Museum. In 2021-2023 she will be Co-Investigator on Tools of Knowledge, a digital humanities project funded by the AHRC that will explore and represent the history of the scientific instrument making trade in Britain and Ireland, 1550-1914.
Rebekah Higgitt, “Greenwich near London”: The Royal Observatory and its London networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, British Journal for the History of Science 52 (2019), 297-322
Rebekah Higgitt, ‘“In the Society’s Strong Box”: A visual and material history of the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, c. 1736-1760’, Nuncius 34 (2019), 284-316
Rebekah Higgitt, ‘Instruments and relics: The history and use of the Royal Society’s object collections c. 1850-1950’, Journal of the History of Collections 31 (2019), 469-485
Rebekah Higgitt, ‘Framing the transit: expeditionary culture and identities in Lieutenant E.J.W. Noble’s caricatures of the 1874 transit of Venus expedition to Honolulu’, Annals of Science 74 (2017), 214-39
Rebekah Higgitt ‘Challenging tropes: genius, heroic invention, and the longitude problem in the museum’, Isis 108 (2017), 371-80
Rebekah Higgitt, ‘Equipping expeditionary astronomers: Nevil Maskelyne and the development of “precision exploration”’ in Fraser MacDonald and C.W.J. Withers (eds), Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration (Ashgate, 2015), pp. 15-36
Rebekah Higgitt, ‘The building of the New Physical Observatory at Greenwich, 1890-99’, British Journal for the History of Science 47 (2014), 609-35
Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt, Finding Longitude: How Ships, Clocks and Stars Helped Solve the Longitude Problem (Collins, 2014)
Rebekah Higgitt (ed.), Maskelyne: Astronomer Royal (Robert Hale, 2014)
Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Biographies of Newton and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (Pickering & Chatto, 2007)
