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Karen Darling

Executive Editor

The University of Chicago Press has published influential books in science studies for well over fifty years, and for the past fifteen I have enjoyed the privilege of continuing this tradition and taking it forward. I believe that many of the most important problems and opportunities in today’s technical and scientific worlds arise from domains examined in the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, including technology, and the physical, human, life, medical, and ecological sciences. Books about science have the potential to reveal its nature and potential in transformative ways—for example, when authors bring to bear the lenses of gender and sexuality, race, and disability studies. I welcome ambitious book proposals and new manuscripts that do this for a variety of audiences, including general readers, specialists, and students.

I look for books that excite, tell stories, and explain our world—past and present—in ways that open eyes, change minds, and push the boundaries of our collective knowledge. I also encourage contributions to three Press series: Oceans in Depth, a new initiative with Katharine Anderson and Helen Rozwadowski; science.culture, a trade series edited by Adrian Johns and Joanna Radin; and Synthesis, a wide-ranging series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed.

I hold a BA from Haverford College and PhD from Northwestern University, both in philosophy, specifically, philosophy of science. Before joining the Books Division at the Press, I was the managing editor of Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy.

The following selection of recent, award-winning acquisitions highlight some of our range, in form and content: Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale; Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution; Cathy Gere, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good: From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond; Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique; Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome; James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920; Nicole C. Nelson, Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders; and Simon Werrett, Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment.

I am pleased to partner in these endeavors with Fabiola Enríquez Flores, Editorial Associate.

Prospective authors are encouraged to consult our submission guidelines. We also provide an overview about publishing with Chicago here.

Karen Darling

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