Professor Richard Yeo - Griffith University

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Photo of Professor Richard Yeo B Arts (Hons), PhD, Sydney University

Professor, School of Humanities
Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities

Contact details for Professor Richard Yeo

Research expertise

History and philosophy of science (European) 17th-19th Century
Cultural and intellectual history of information
History of the Book

Current teaching areas

History & Philosophy of Science
Enlightenment Philosophy & Public Debate

Selected Grant successes

2012-15: Associate Investigator in ARC Centre for the History of Emotions, based at UWA, Sydney, Melbourne and UQ.
2008-2011: ARC Discovery Grant no.O879856: ‘Memory, Notebooks and Archives: Making Early Modern Science’ (Chief Investigator).
2008-10: ARC Grant Project: Network for Early European Research; for conference and publications on ‘Notebooks and Note-takers in early modern Europe (convenor).
2002-07: ARC Fellowship: Award of ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship for five years . Project on ‘A Cultural History of Information: Lessons from the Enlightenment’ (Chief Investigator).

Publications

Books

Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, in press)
Keeping Notes in Early Modern England: Scientific Inquiry and Hippocrates’ Complaint (Melbourne: Ancora Press; forthcoming 2013).
Encyclopaedic Visions; reissued in paperback 2010.
Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture, 1800-60, London: Ashgate, Variorum series, 2001.
Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 (a 350 page monograph).
Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (edited with M. Shortland), Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Defining Science, op.cit., reissued in paperback 2003.
Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), a 290 page monograph in the 'Ideas in Context' series. Joint winner of W.K. Hancock Prize, 1993-4.
The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical Studies (D. Reidel, Boston and Dordrecht, 1986), (edited with J.A. Schuster). This book is volume 4 of the Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (General ed. Rod Home).

Invited lectures

Inaugural annual lecture (in the field of intellectual history) in memory of Louis Green (1929-2008) in State Library of Victoria, Melbourne 21 Nov 2011. Title: 'Keeping Notes in early modern England: scientific inquiry and Hippocrates’ complaint’
‘HPS in Second Scientific Revolution: the view from Britain’, at Ecole Normale Superiéure, University of Paris, May 2008.
Inaugural Professorial Lecture, May 2004, A Philosopher and his Notebooks. Title: John Locke (1632-1704) on Memory and Information. Online via Griffith University Library Catalogue.
‘Encyclopaedism’, Keynote address, Lund University, Sweden, November 2003.
'Ephraim Chambers and Hans Sloane as encyclopaedic collectors’; opening lecture at a conference marking the 250th anniversary of the British Museum, London, April 2002.

Edited Primary Source Collections with new introductions

Collected Works of William Whewell, 16 vols, edited and introduced by Richard Yeo, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001. My 'Introduction' is in vol.1, pp. v-xxiv.
The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, David Brewster (ed), 18 vols, 1808-1830, edited and with a new introduction by Richard Yeo. Reprint by Routledge: London and New York, 1999. My 'Introduction' is in vol.1, pp.v-xxii.

Journal articles

(refereed journals marked with asterisk; these range in length from 10,000 to 26,000 words)

'Introduction' to special issue on 'Note-Taking in early modern Europe' in Intellectual History Review, vol.20, issue 3 (2010), 301-02; co-edited with Ann Blair.
'Loose Notes and Capacious Memory: Robert Boyle's Note-taking and its Rationale', Intellectual History Review, vol. 20, issue 3 (2010), 335-354.
'Friendship in early Modern Philosophy and Science' (with Vanessa Smith), Parergon 26 (2009), 1-9.
'John Locke on Conversation with Friends and Strangers', Parergon 26 (2009), 11-37.
'Notebooks as Memory Aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern England', Memory Studies, 1 (2008) 115-136.
'Lost Encyclopaedias: Before and After the Enlightenment', Book History, 10 (2007), 47-68.
'Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in seventeenth-century England', History of Science, 45 (March 2007), 1-46.
'Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush on External Memory', Science in Context 20/1 (2007), 21-47.
The Australian 7 July 2004, pp. 32-33 on 300th anniversary of death of John Locke
'John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information', Eighteenth Century Thought, 2 (2004), 1-38.
'John Locke's 'Of Study' (1677): interpreting an unpublished essay', Locke Studies 3 (2003), 147-65.
'A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) as 'the best Book in the Universe', Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 61-72.
'The Encyclopaedic Life': review symposium, Metascience, vol. 11, no. 2 (2002), 154-176. Consists of three reviews (by D. Miller, J. Topham and M. Frasca-Spada) and reply by me as author (pp. 171-76).
'Managing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe': an essay review of Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, in Minerva 40, no. 3 (2002), 301-314.
'Mod'les d'outre-Manche', Les Cahiers de Science et Vie (Paris, October 1998), pp. 24-6.
'Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia and the Tradition of Commonplaces, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57(1996), 157-75.
'Visual Cultures': essay review of B. Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, MIT Press, 1994, in Metascience, 6(1994), 46-9.
'Author's Response' to four reviews of Defining Science, Metascience, 5 (1994), 24-30.
'Reading Encyclopaedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730-1850', Isis, vol.82 (1991), 24-49.
'Knowledge vs Information', Culture and Policy, vol.2, no.1 (1990), 57-65.
'Reviewing Herschel's Discourse', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 20(4) (1989), 541-552.
'Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860', Science in Context, 2(2) (1988), 257-284.
'William Whewell on the History of Science', Metascience, 5 (1987), 25-40.
'The Principle of Plenitude and Natural Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain', British Journal for the History of Science, 19 (1986), 263-282.
'An Idol of the Market-Place: Baconianism in Nineteenth-Century Britain', History of Science, 23 (1985), 251-298.
'Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Robert Chambers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation', Victorian Studies, 28 (1984), 5-31.
'Social dimensions to theories of knowledge', Proceedings of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science, 11 (1980), 135-51.
'William Whewell, Natural Theology and the Philosophy of Science in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain', Annals of Science, 36 (1979), 493-516.
'What is the History of Science?', Teaching History, 12 (1978), 44-59.

Chapters in books

(at invitation of editor and with refereeing by a board of advisors)

'Memory and Empirical Information: Samuel Hartlib, John Beale and Robert Boyle', in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 185-210. Hardcover ISBN: 978-90-481-3685-8.
'Encyclopaedia' in Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. M. Suarez, 2 vols.,(OUP, 2010), vol. 2, pp. 697-99.
'John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information' reprinted in Peter Anstey (ed), John Locke: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Series II, 4 vols(Routledge, 2006), in vol. 4, pp. 243-280.
'John Locke and Polite Philosophy' in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, ed. C. Condren, S. Gaukroger, and I. Hunter (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 254-275.
'Encyclopedism' in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. M. C. Horowitz, 6 vols (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 669-73.
'Encyclopaedias and Enlightenment', in Iain McCalman (general editor), The Enlightenment World, Routledge World Studies Series, 2004). pp. 350-65
'William Whewell', new and revised 7000 word entry for the The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols, (Oxford University Press, 2004), vo. 58, pp. 463-70
'Encyclopaedic Collectors: Hans Sloane and Ephraim Chambers', in R. Anderson, M. Caygill and L. Syson (eds), Enlightening the British, London: British Museum, 2003, 39-36.
'Encyclopaedias', entry in J. Heilbron et. al. (eds) The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 252-55.
'Classifying the Sciences', in ed. Roy Porter (ed), Cambridge History of Science: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 241-66. A Chinese translation is due in August 2007.
'William Whewell', in P. Harman and S. Mitton (eds) Cambridge Scientific Minds, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 51-63
'Encyclopedias', in A. Hessenbruch (ed), Reader's Guide to the History of Science, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001, pp. 208-9.
'Encyclopaedic Knowledge', in Marina Frasca-Spada and Nicholas Jardine (eds) Books and the Sciences in History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 207-224
'Natural Philosophy', in Iain McCalman (ed.) An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 320-28. Also entries on 'Encyclopaedias' (p.496) and 'William Whewell' (p. 758).
'Alphabetical Lives: Scientific Biography in Historical Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias' in Telling Lives in Science, R. Yeo and M. Shortland (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 139-169.
'Introduction' (with M. Shortland) in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 1-44.
'William Whewell's Philosophy of Knowledge and its Reception', in M. Fisch and S. Schaffer (eds), William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 175-199.
'Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain', in P. Brantlinger (ed.), Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain (Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 1-27.
'Science', in S. Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (Garland Publishing, New York, 1988), pp. 694-696.
'Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830-1917', in op.cit., pp. 259-298.
'Introduction' to The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method, Historical Studies (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1986), pp.ix-xxxvii (with J.A. Schuster).
'Scientific Method and the Image of Science' in R.M. MacLeod and P. Collins (eds), The Parliament of Science: the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1981 (London, Science Reviews Ltd, 1981), pp. 65-88.

Selected Reviews

Note: All these reviews were solicited by the review editors of the respective journals.

Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland (editors), The Early Britannica: the growth of an outstanding encyclopedia. xiv + 349pp., illus., bibl., index. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), in Isis 102 (2011), pp. 146-7.
Aude Doody, Pliny’s Encyclopedia: the Reception of the Natural History (Oxford, 2010), in Isis 103(2012), p. 169.
Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. IN Nature 22 February (2007), 820-1.
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, by Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham; pp. xi + 329. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, IN Victorian Studies, 18 (2005) 151-53.
Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box. The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia, trans. Ann M. Hentschel(Chicago University Press, 2002), in British Journal for the History of Science
Kathryn A. Neeley, Mary Somerville. Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001), IN Metascience, 12, no. 1 (March 2003), 105-08.
Burckhardt, F (ed) Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection, Cambridge University Press, 1996 IN Metascience. 7(March 1998), 197-99.
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation... ed. James Secord, University of Chicago Press, 1996 IN British Journal for the History of Science, 29 (1996), 104-5.
Jean le Rond D'Alembert, 'Preliminary Discourse', ed. R. Schwab, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995, IN British Journal for the History of Science, 29(1996), 366-7.
Colin Finney, Paradise Revealed: Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Australia, in ISIS, 86 (1995), 125-6.
Patricia Phillips, 'The Scientific Lady: a social history of women's scientific interests 1520-1918' in Metascience, 2(1992), 86-7.
Menachem Fisch, William Whewell: Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, 1991, in British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 368-9.
F.W. and J.M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 1989 in Metascience, 1 (1991), 117-19.
James Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, in Social History of Medicine (1990), 149-50.
Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debates, 1800-1860. Cambridge University Press (1988) in Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 333-334.
Peter Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain 1850-1920. Oxford, Hamburg, New York: Berg, 1987 in Victorian Studies, 32 (1989), 581-2.
Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism, in British Journal for the History of Science 21 (1988), 263-264.
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 2, 1837-1844 (1988), in History of European Ideas, 9 (1988), 370-71.
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 1, 1821-1836. Edited by F. Burkhardt and S. Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1985), in History of European Ideas, 8 (1987), 112-113.
{ J. Durant (ed.), Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (Blackwell, 1985), in Annals of Science 43 (1986), 578-9.
{ C. Russell, Cross-currents: Interactions between Science and Faith (Intervarsity Press, 1985).
D. Postlethwaite, Making it Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of their World (Ohio State University Press, 1984), in Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), 620-623.
{ R. Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
{ M.J.S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific { Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago University Press, 1985).
P. Turnbull, Phrenology: First Science of Man (Deakin University Press, 1982) in Proceedings of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science, 13 (1982), 26-30.
C. Chant and F. Farrel (eds), Science and Belief from Darwin to Einstein (Longmans, 1981), in History of European Ideas, 4 (1983), 350-353.
C. Chant and F. Farrel (eds), Science and Belief from Darwin to Einstein (Longmans, 1981), in History of European Ideas, 4 (1983), 350-353.
M. Garland, Cambridge before Darwin, the Ideal of Liberal Education 1880-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), in Annals of Science, 39 (1982), 94-95.
J.P. Sutcliffe (ed.), Conceptual Analysis and Method in Psychology: Essays in Honour of W.M. O'Neil (Sydney University Press, 1978) in Sydney University News, 13 December 1978, p.241.

Other Papers:

Submission to Senate Inquiry on 'The Organisation and Funding of Research in Higher Education', Canberra, March 1994. My comments are mentioned in Report of the Inquiry into the Organization and Funding of Research in Higher Education, Canberra, March 1994, p.114.
'Studies in the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science and Technology: their place in Higher Education', a submission to the Senate Inquiry into Higher Education, reprinted in Australasian Association for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science Newsletter No.34 (1989), pp.4-9. This submission was mentioned in Priorities for Reform in Higher Education, Senate Standing Committee Report, Canberra, 1990, pp.6-7.