Contact Information
810 S. Wight Street M/C 466
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois. He specializes in transnational history of biological, environmental, and information sciences in cultural context.
Sepkoski's most recent book, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity, will be published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago, 2012) and Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2007), as well as several edited volumes and special journal issues.
His current research interests include the history of data practices in the natural sciences, the cultural impact of the sciences of "deep time" at the turn of the current millennium, and the history of biological determinism.
Research Interests
History of Science
Education
PhD, Program in History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota
MA, Social Sciences, University of Chicago
BA, Carleton College
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, School of Information Sciences
Recent Publications
Sepkoski, D. (2021). Databases. In A. Blair, P. Duguid, A-S. Goeing, & A. Grafton (Eds.), Information: A Historical Companion (pp. 392-396). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1pdrrbs.41
Sepkoski, D. (2021). Review: L. Barnett's After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe. ISIS, 112(1), 186-187. https://doi.org/10.1086/713449
Sepkoski, D. C. (2020). Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226354613.001.0001
Sepkoski, D. (2019). The Unfinished Synthesis? Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology in the 20th Century. Journal of the History of Biology, 52(4), 687-703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9537-8
Sepkoski, D., & Tamborini, M. (2018). "An image of science": Cameralism, statistics, and the visual language of natural history in the nineteenth century. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 48(1), 56-109. https://doi.org/10.1525/HSNS.2018.48.1.56
