Our Staff and Editorial Board

Rob Iliffe is currently Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and was editorial director of the AHRC Newton Papers Project from 1999-2015. He is author of a A Very Short Introduction to Isaac Newton, and is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2016). His monograph, Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Scott Mandelbrote is presently Official Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge and has published widely in early modern history. He is the author or co-author of various scholarly catalogues, including Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work (Cambridge, 2001), which accompanied a major exhibition of Newton’s work at Cambridge University Library.

Staff Members

Michael Hawkins (Technical Director) is responsible for all the technical aspects of the Newton Project and the Newton Mint Papers Project, including helping to establish their encoding policies, designing of their websites and developing their underlying infrastructure. He completed his PhD on Thomas Willis’s neurocartography of the passions in 2004 at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College, London and has worked in the Digital Humanities for over fifteen years. He has served as Technical Director of numerous digital humanities projects, including Darwin Correspondence Project (Cambridge University Library), Casebooks (University of Cambridge), the Wordsworth Project (University of Newcastle), the Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook (University of Cambridge), Livingstone Online (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL), and the British Living Standards Project (University of Sussex).

Cornelis J. (Kees-Jan) Schilt (Research Associate for the Newton Mint Papers Project and overall Transcription Manager) holds degrees in Physics & Astrophysics (BSc) and History & Philosophy of Science (MSc) from Utrecht University, and recently completed his DPhil in History of Science with Rob Iliffe at the University of Oxford on a thesis titled "Prophecy, History and Method: How and Why Isaac Newton studied Chronology". His main focus is on Newton’s reading and writing practices as they emerge from his chronological studies, combining various approaches from classical and digital humanities. He specializes in digital editing, early modern history, history of science & religion, and in particular Newton’s life and works. He has also been involved in the transcription of several of Newton’s historical and religious manuscripts. He blogs on all things Newtonian on Corpus Newtonicum.

Alice Marples (Research Associate for the Newton Mint Papers Project) is a graduate of the University of Glasgow and King's College London, where she completed her PhD in 2016. Since then she has been Shreeve Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester and a Lisa Jardine History of Science Grant Holder at the Royal Society. Her research focuses on interrelations between manuscript, human and natural resources in the linked worlds of commerce and scholarship in Britain between c.1600 and 1850. She has published widely on a range of related topics, including scientific administration in the early eighteenth century (Historical Research, 2019), and has articles forthcoming in Notes and Records of the Royal Society and the Journal of the History of Collections. She is in the process of completing her first monograph provisionally entitled The Transactioneer: Hans Sloane and the Rise of Public Natural History in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Yvonne Santacreu (Project Manager for the Newton Mint Papers Project) has extensive experience managing digital assets having worked for Universal Pictures International as a DVD producer. Previously she worked for World Wildlife Fund in Washington, DC and Valencia, Spain and for Pesticide Action Network in San Francisco as a researcher and programme coordinator involved in international policy and environmental education campaigns. She has worked in the Digital Humanities since 2006. She has been a transcriber and encoder for the Newton Project since 2006, Project Manager for the Enlightening Science Project (2009) and Assistant Editor at The Casebooks Project from 2014 to 2018. She is also currently working for the Wordsworth Project in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University.

Translator

Michael Silverthorne translates Newton’s theological texts. He taught Classics at McGill University until retirement in 2004. His previous translations include Bacon, New Organon, Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise and Locke on Toleration (Cambridge, 2000, 2007, 2010). He has also translated or co-edited texts by Francis Hutcheson for Liberty Fund, including Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (2008). He is Associate Editor of the forthcoming Clarendon edition of David Hume’s Essays Moral, Political, and Literary.

Former Staff Members

John Young (Transcription and XML Tagging Manager 2000-2010) gained a PhD from Sheffield University on early modern networks of scientific communication. In the early 1990s he transcribed the German material in the papers of Samuel Hartlib for The Hartlib Papers on CD-Rom (UMI: Ann Arbor, 1995, 2d ed. HROnline: Sheffield, 2002) and was later a transcriber for the John Foxe Project at Sheffield University. He has been with the Newton Project since 2000, first at Imperial College, London and later at the University of Sussex. He has published Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot, 1998), and is co-editor and co-translator of Jan Jonston’s Letters to Samuel Hartlib (Warsaw, 2000). With Rob Iliffe and Peter Spargo, he is co-author of the online catalogue of Newton’s non-scientific papers. Though his full-time contract expired in 2010, he continues to work for the project part-time as transcriber and editorial consultant.

Cesare Pastorino (Transcription Manager 2011-2013) gained a PhD from the History and Philosophy of Science department at Indiana University, working on Francis Bacon, technical invention and experiment. He is broadly interested in humanities computing and in early modern natural philosophy. Between 2004 and 2009 he was a research and editorial assistant for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton. During that period, he transcribed and produced initial editing of about twenty-five of Newton’s Latin alchemical manuscripts. He also developed a digital reference tool, the Digital Index Chemicus, out of Isaac Newton’s manuscripts forming the Index Chemicus (Keynes Ms. 30).

Other Transcribers and Encoders

The following have also contributed to transcription, text encoding and/or proofreading:

Micah Anshan completed his BA in the History of Science and Technology at the University of King’s College in 2011, writing his thesis on the history of Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity. He holds a MA in Science and Technology Studies from York University, where he was a fellow of Ogoode Hall’s Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Micah has transcribed for the Newton Project since 2009 and has also transcribed for the John Tyndall Correspondence Project. He is currently the Development Officer at Right To Play Canada in Toronto.

Daniele Cassisa (TEI-P5 XML and MathML transcriber and encoder) is a statistician and software developer. He gained an ‘old’ Italian Laurea from Bocconi University and a Laurea Magistralis in Statistics from Milan-Bicocca University. He acquired relevant professional experience in the private sector, working in different roles as a data analyst and computer programmer.

Linda Cross gained an MA in Applied Linguistics from Sheffield University. She was previously a transcriber and text-encoder on the Canterbury Tales and John Foxe Projects, and a teacher at Sheffield University’s Institute for Lifelong Learning. She is currently an Occupational Therapy Assistant at Sheffield Children’s Hospital while continuing to do transcription and text-encoding for the Newton Project.

Raquel Delgado-Moreira was awarded a PhD in April 2006 for her thesis on ‘Epistemology and Rhetorical Strategies in Newton’s Theological Writings’, which she completed at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College. She now lives in Switzerland.

Shannon Higgins completed her BA at the University of King’s College and her MA at Dalhousie University, focusing on the interactions between astronomy and religion in the early modern period. She is currently working towards a Master of Information Studies at McGill University, and works at Concordia University Libraries.

Rebekah Higgitt completed a PhD at Imperial College on nineteenth-century biographies of Newton in 2005. She is co-editor, with Rob Iliffe and Milo Keynes, of Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660-1885 (2 vols., Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

Dolores Iorizzo (Collaborative Projects Co-ordinator during the Project’s London phase) worked for many years on the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca Project at King’s College, London.

Dr Robert Ralley has worked in digital humanities for over a decade and was an Assistant Editor in the Cambridge Platonism Project in 2019. From 2010-2018, he was a Senior Editor for The Casebooks Project in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. He is currently helping to edit and encode Isaac Newton’s mathematical writings for the Newton Project in the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. He also independently transcribed and edited Forman’s major guide to astrology and supplied it with a critical introduction. He wrote a PhD dissertation on clerical physicians in fifteenth-century England (Cambridge, 2005), held a Wellcome Research Fellowship focussing on ‘Medical Times in Late Medieval England’, and has published on the history of medicine, astrology, and magic. He is currently working on a volume of collected papers that contains letters and drafts of various texts relating to Newton's priority dispute with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of the calculus.

Editorial Board

Antonio Clericuzio (University of Roma Tre) has written a number of articles on the history of matter theory and has published Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht, 2000)

William Newman (University of Indiana) is acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on the history of alchemy. Amongst many other works, he has published Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (London, 1994) and Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago and London, 2004). He is directing the transcription of Newton’s alchemical legacy.

Lawrence Principe (Johns Hopkins University) is one of the most eminent historians of alchemy. His major work is The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, 1998), and he and Newman are co-authors of Alchemy Tried in the Fire (Chicago, 2002), a ground-breaking study of the laboratory practice of Newton, Boyle and their alchemical forebears and contemporaries.

Stephen Snobelen (University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia) has published a number of articles on Newton’s theology. As director of the Newton Project Canada, he is overseeing and contributing to the transcription and encoding of a number of Newton’s writings on prophecy.

Peter Spargo (University of Cape Town), an engineer and chemist by training, has written on the history and dispersal of Newton’s manuscripts and on his work in laboratory chemistry. He is currently working on Newton’s records of his chemical experiments and is also compiling a dictionary of early and obsolete chemical terms. With Rob Iliffe and John Young, he is co-author of the online catalogue of Newton’s non-scientific papers.

© 2024 The Newton Project

Professor Rob Iliffe
Director, AHRC Newton Papers Project

Scott Mandelbrote,
Fellow & Perne librarian, Peterhouse, Cambridge

Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL - newtonproject@history.ox.ac.uk

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