Dr Richard Oosterhoff

Richard Oosterhoff is senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches early modern history and the history of science. He completed a PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame and taught there briefly before taking up a research position at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, where he was also a JRF and then Fellow of St Edmund’s College. He has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, Houghton Library (Harvard University), the Warburg Institute (School for Advanced Studies, University of London), the Nanovic Institute, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. 

Dr Oosterhoff has published widely on early modern mathematical culture, from astronomy to numerology, including his first monograph, Making Mathematical Culture: University and Print in the Circle of Lefèvre d’Étaples (Oxford, 2018).  

A second strand of research uses the lens of ingenuity to consider the intellectual and cultural frameworks of artisanal and artistic knowledge, including a co-written monograph, Logodaedalus: Words Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2018), and an essay collection, Ingenuity in the Making: Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2021), co-edited with José Ramón Marcaida and Alexander Marr. 

More recently, Dr Oosterhoff has also been working on the history of knowledge in relation to early modern travel literature, for example through the figure of José de Acosta. With Anthony Ossa-Richardson he has translated Leo Africanus’ Cosmography and Geography of Africa, forthcoming with Penguin Classics in 2023.