Dr. David Sepkoski

Biography

David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois. He specializes in transnational history, biological and environmental sciences, and the cultural context surrounding them. His recent book, 'Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction Value Diversity' (University of Chicago Press, 2020), explores these themes, and he is also the author of 'Rereading the Fossil Record: Growth in Paleobiology and the Evolutionary Discipline' (Chicago, 2012) and 'Nominalism and Constructivism: Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy' (Routledge, 2007), among other works. His current research focuses on the historical implications of scientific and cultural debates about the biological basis of human nature and difference. In 2020-2021, he held a Guggenheim Fellowship for his project 'The Politics of Human Nature: Biological Determinism, Sociobiology, and the Human Genome.' His research interests extend to the history of data and information, and cultural technological history, as well as electronic music.

Research Interests