Helen Anne Curry

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Peter Lipton Senior Lecturer in History of Modern Science and Technology, University of Cambridge

Helen Anne Curry holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in History
from Yale University. After completing her doctorate in 2012, she took up the Peter Lipton Lectureship
at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and became a
Fellow and Director of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science at Churchill College. A historian
of recent science and technology, she is particularly interested in the entangled histories of modern biology
and biotechnology, industrial agriculture, and environmental change. Her current research considers the
history of global conservation, in particular efforts made to preserve the genetic diversity of agricultural
crop species through the practice of seed banking.

Curry is the author of Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-
Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-editor with Nicholas Jardine, James Secord and
Emma Spary of Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

During her time as a Pro Futura Scienta Fellow, she will prepare a book manuscript, Endangered Maize:
Indigenous Corn, Industrial Agriculture, and the Crisis of Extinction, which will chart the history of
twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts to collect and conserve the genetic diversity of maize in the
Americas.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2019-20.