In 2014, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of York (History of Art Department), and conducted research on the role of photography and visual culture of the Tichborne Claimant legal case in the late 19th century. My family joined me and we had an amazing year in beautiful Read more…
It was a huge pleasure to be an external faculty scholar affiliated to the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK for 3 years, 2014-17. The Centre, whose inaugural director was Prof. Elizabeth Edwards, has grown into a dynamic graduate program led by scholars Kelley Wilder, Read more…
“In a time when the world and its phenomena have been photographed many times over, what can we learn by revisiting the early days of photography, when strange, dramatic, and novel images served as both evidence and entertainment?” The article may be accessed through Aperture’s Archive here.
Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 (paperback, 2013). In the late nineteenth century, new applications of photography sparked a complex debate about scientific practices and the value of the photographic images in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge, from medicine and Read more…
Writing in the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section, I examine the strange and extraordinary history of the iconic “monkey-to-man” evolution illustration—one of the most intriguing and misleading drawings in the modern history of science. Though the image fails to accurately illustrate Darwinian evolutionary theory, it has been hugely successful as Read more…
Tucker, “The Hidden World of Science: Nature as Art in 1930’s American Print Advertising,” Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 6:1 (Fall 2012): 90-105. Pdf available here. Abstract: “Photographs deployed in scientific investigation also are circulated and consumed in popular culture. Examination of the work Read more…
Tucker, “Eye on the Street: Photography in Urban Public Spaces,” Radical History Review 114: Walkers, Voyeurs and the Politics of Urban Space, eds. Daniel Walkowitz & Robyn Autry (Fall 2021): 7-18. [Free online access through RHR]. Abstract: “Some of the most powerful historical images of streets and the people traversing Read more…
The question of whether life could be detected on other bodies in the universe is among the oldest and most enduring, and one of the first questions to which the telescope was applied when it was invented around 1608. In this op-ed, I write about the great thinkers over the Read more…
In this op-ed, I discuss the roots in medieval science of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s misguided assertion that the female body will try to “shut that whole thing down” in the case of “legitimate rape.” I examine different views of reproduction from the Middle Ages through the 19th century. Read more…
