Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Economy, Technology and Society
- Empires, Colonialisms and Indigeneity
Areas of Interest
History of Science; Environmental History; Animal History; History of Natural History
Biography
Rebecca Woods is an historian of science, environment, and animals working primarily in the 19th century. Woods's research explores the complex cultural histories of diverse animals, ranging from extinct woolly mammoths to imperial sheep and cattle, as they figure into scientific thought, technological change, and ecologies both real and imagined. Her first book, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (UNC Press, 2017) examined how breeds of sheep and cattle circulated and were altered under imperial conditions in the nineteenth century. Woods's current research examines the history of frozen mammoths and how these individual animals have shaped and contributed to environmental and palentological thought since the late 18th century. From the rarest of scientific specimens, with contemporary global warming, these and other Pleistocene megafauna now emerge from the Siberian and North American permafrost on a seasonal basis, becoming bellwethers for a warming planet.
Education
Awards
- 2024 Insight Development Grant Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- 2023 Partnership Engage Grant Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- 2018 Visiting Scholar Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Publications
- “Anticipating Extinction: Mammoths, Elephants, and the Late 19th-Century Ivory Trade” (London, Lexington Books : 2023)
- “Telling Time with Mammoths: Frozen Flesh and Temporal Arrangement in the Circumpolar North Since 1800” ( : 2023)
- “‘The Shape of Meat’: Preserving Animal Flesh in Victorian Britain” (The University of Chicago Press Journals : 2020)
- “Nature and the Refrigerating Machine: The Politics and Production of Cold in the Nineteenth Century” (Cambridge MA: MIT Press Direct : 2017)
- “Green Mountain Merinos: Sheep Breeding in Nineteenth-Century Vermont” ( : 2017)
- The Herds Shot Round the World Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (The University of North Carolina Press : 2017)
- “From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible: Building an Empire of Sheep in New Zealand, c. 1880-1900” ( : 2015)
- “Breed, Culture, and Economy: The New Zealand Frozen Meat Trade, 1880-1914” ( : 2012)