President Letter 2026

One last message from me, as my term as President comes to a close.

When I attended my first BSHS Postgraduate Conference back in 2003 I would have never expected to serve as the Society’s President one day. But it is precisely these unexpected turns that the BSHS is great at nurturing, and I am sure there will be more to come as we continue to support our discipline nationally and internationally.

This last message is first and foremost a thank you to all who make the BSHS a welcoming and supportive community, and a leading society in all aspects of good academic and engagement practice. The HSS/ESHS conference in Edinburgh just a month ago, organised with the support of BSHS, was a clear instance of what can happen when we put our expertise and collegiality to the service of the discipline at large. I am grateful to Sam Robinson, Michael Barany, Rebekah Higgitt and Lucy Santos for the impeccable local arrangements, for ensuring that historians of science could seamlessly flood the centre of Edinburgh for five days, and for organising a spectacular and truly memorable Cèilidh at the National Museum of Scotland! And a special thank you goes to Aileen Fyfe and Graeme Gooday, who represented the BSHS as Programme Co-Chairs, and who brought together a remarkable team of reviewers from the BSHS community to develop an extraordinarily rich and diverse programme: Amelia Bonea, Serafina Cuomo, Sarah Easterby-Smith, Seb Falk, Rob Iliffe, Nanna Kaalund, Chris Manias, James Poskett, Greg Radick, Edwin Rose, Richard Staley, Laurence Totelin. Thank you all on behalf of the BSHS!

My time as President has been extraordinary. Only over the past year we have awarded two prizes, which attest to the richness and quality of current scholarship in the history of science and to how our discipline remains a hub of hope and resistance in really difficult times. The Pickstone Prize for the best scholarly book in the history of science, chaired this year by Rebekah Higgitt, was awarded to David Singerman for Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (University of Chicago Press, 2025). We also awarded two high commendations, to Brad Bolman, for Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Sadiah Qureshi for Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction Allen Lane, 2025). Look out also for the Pickstone Prize shortlist: this was a great year for the Prize, and the shortlist gives you a glimpse of the exceptional calibre of the submissions we received.

The Singer Prize is among my favourite BSHS prizes – and that is because it gives us all a sense of the potential of our scholarship in the making, by recognising the best essay(s) written by our talented early-career researchers. This was an exceptional year for the Singer Prize, with a high volume of submissions, two joint winners and two special commendations. The winners of the Singer Prize are Lucy Jameson (Durham University), with the essay ‘Pass the Parcel: Disabled Expertise, Prosthetics of Productivity, and Scientific Management in the British Post Office 1918-1921’ and Michelle Pfeffer (University of Oxford), with the essay ‘Astrologers on Trial in Early Modern Oxbridge’. Special commendations were awarded to Sara Bassanelli (Politecnico di Torino/Università di Pavia), with the essay ‘Charged Affairs : Managing Disagreement in Interwar Electrical Standardisation Diplomacy’, and Francis Newman (Harvard University), with the essay ‘Hippocratic Modernity: Meteorology, Medicine and the Co-Colonisation of Weather and Disease in Victorian Britain and Treaty-Port China’. The remarkable range and diversity of themes and approaches in this list is a promising sign about the future of our discipline!

And our prizes are only part of the activities of the BSHS in support of our field. We continue to award Master Bursaries, Small Conference Grants, Outreach and Engagement Grants, Research Grants and much more. Check out our Grants and Prizes webpage for further details.

You might have noticed that our website has a new shiny look. This is because over the past year, our Communications Officer Alexander Stoeger has been working on it in the distinctively professional manner that characterises all his work. We still have a few updates and details to iron out (not Alexander’s responsibility!), but we are hugely grateful to Alexander for undertaking and completing successfully this key task for the public-facing side of our Society.

I have a request to all members on behalf of our journal, the British Journal for the History of Science. We have now moved to an editorial management system, Scholar One, and you might occasionally receive requests from our system to peer-review articles for the journal. Please do not ignore the requests, and if you can, please spare some time to continue to support the BJHS’ rigorous peer review process. We know that reviewing is a big time commitment – and yet another unremunerated request on academics’ endless to-do-list. But it is also what keeps our scholarship going, ensuring the continuing success and quality of our journal. Please continue to play your role in this success, and if you have served as a reviewer for the BJHS a heartfelt thank you for your work and your time.

I want to close this message to offer a thank you to all the colleagues and past presidents I had the pleasure to work with on Council – not just during my time as President but also during my time as Secretary over the past decade. What I learned from all of you has been truly transformative in academic and personal terms, and it has been an honour to look after our Society together. And to all our members, a thank you for continuing to support our work and our discipline. There are hard times ahead, but the community we have built is a reason of hope, and evidence that small, thoughtful  actions can lead to big changes.

And now it is time to officially pass the baton to our new President, Rebekah Higgitt, Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. Rebekah is a leading figure in the history of science nationally and internationally, and the BSHS could not be in more experienced and truly wise hands! She will step in on 1 September, and it will be a privilege for me to work with her as Vice-President over the next year, before rotating out of Council.     

Thank you to all of you once more for making the British Society for the History of Science a truly special community. I promise I will stick around!

All the best,

Chiara Ambrosio

Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL
President (1 Sept 2024-31 Aug 2026), The British Society for the History of Science