Edwin D. Rose is currently AHRC Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Advanced Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. From May 2025 he will be a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds.
Reading the World is a richly detailed exploration of the interplay between natural history and book culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rose reveals how 'paper technologies'--from collection slips to natural history books--transformed amassing, classifying, and the global knowledge networks throughout the British Empire. This groundbreaking work masterfully offers us a new perspective of how print culture and innovative collecting practices reshaped scientific authority and knowledge production in the making of the modern world.--Gordon McOuat, University of King's College