David Edgerton FBA
Centre Co-lead; Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology, and Professor of British Modern History at the Department of History, King's College London. David Edgerton is a historian of science and technology and of twentieth-century Britain. His work rethinks the ways we think about the past of science and technology, and suggests frameworks in which it becomes possible for the history of science and technology to contribute to rethinking their historical context. He is particularly known for a new account of science, technology and the state, for advocating a non-innovation-centric approach to the history of technology and for a remapping of the history of science to avoid taking a small part of academic research as the whole.
He has written a number of books which put new histories of science and technology into twentieth-century British and global history, changing those histories in the process. Among them are Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970 (2005) and The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2006 and 2019). They have been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. He has also written on the history and political economy of research policy and been engaged in discussion on contemporary research policy with parliament, government departments and learned societies. He appears regularly on TV and radio and has written for many journals and newspapers including Nature, BMJ, Research Fortnight, Financial Times, The Times, Observer, Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, Literary Review and the London Review of Books.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford. In 2024/25 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Biography
David Edgerton FBA studied chemistry at Oxford where he was introduced to the history and philosophy of science by Margaret Gowing, Allan Chapman, and Peter Lipton. He went on to do his PhD at Imperial College with Gary Werskey, working on the history of British industrial policy. He joined the University of Manchester in 1984 at first to teach the economics of science and technology. There he was one of the original staff members of the CHSTM, founded by John Pickstone in 1986, and worked mainly on the history of aviation and of industrial R&D. He moved to Imperial College London in 1993 where he was the founding director of CHoSTM, which he led until 2003 and moved with it to King’s College in 2013. Since 2002 he has been Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology. He has won the T.S. Ashton Prize (with Sally Horrocks) and gave the 2009 Bernal-Wilkins-Medawar Prize Lecture at the Royal Society.
Teaching
David Edgerton teaches MA courses in British history and the history of science and technology, as well as undergraduate courses on the history of innovation and capitalism.