Professor Iwan Rhys Morus


MA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab) Photograph of Professor Iwan Rhys Morus.

Contact

Email: irm@aber.ac.uk
Office: C46
Phone: 2670

Biography

Iwan Rhys Morus MA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab) is a historian of nineteenth century science, technology and medicine. He also has interests in the history of the body and nineteenth-century popular culture. He has published widely on these topics and recent books include Shocking Bodies (History Press, 2011), When Physics became King (Chicago, 2005), Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Books, 2004) and Frankenstein's Children (Princeton, 1998). His current research projects focus on nineteenth-century optical illusions as philosophical and experimental practices as well as the more general history of scientific performances in the nineteenth century. Dr. Morus is the editor of History of Science. He is also the Project Director for the ‘Memory and Media in Wales’ JISC-funded research project and a senior collaborator on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project at Montana State University.

Staff Publications

Journal articles

  • "Cables and Coils and Gassiot Cascades: That’s what Electrical Bodies are made of", Annales Historiques de l’Électricité, 2010, 8: 105-17.
  • "Illuminating the Victorians", History and Technology, 2010, 26: 157-62.
  • "Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen: Placing Galvanism at the End of the English Enlightenment," Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 2009, 63: 263-75.
  • "What is the History of Science Really Like?" History of Science, 2009, 47: 359-66.
  • "Sensational, Spectacular Science", Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2009, 39: 356-66.
  • "Newton, Duw a Dawkins", Diwinyddiaeth, 2008, 59: 4-10.
  • "Working Out in the Nineteenth Century", Studies in History & Philosophy of Science, 2007, 38: 605-9
  • "The Two Cultures of Electricity: Between Entertainment and Edification in Victorian Science," Science & Education, 2007, 16: 593-602

Chapters in books

  • "In the Ether: Electricity and the Victorian Future", Mary Kemperink & Leonieke Vermeer (eds), Utopianism and the Sciences (Leuven: Peeters Publishing, 2010), 17-32
  • "A Dynamical Form of Mechanical Effect: Thomson’s Thermodynamics", Raymond Flood, Mark McCartney & Andrew Whitaker (ed.), Kelvin : Life, Labours and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 122-39
  • "More the Aspect of Magic than Anything Natural: The Philosophy of Demonstration in Victorian Popular Science," Bernard Lightman & Aileen Fyfe (eds.), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century Sites and Experiences (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 336-70

Books

  • Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (History Press, 2011)