Overview
Jeremy R. Schneider is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. Born in Heidelberg, he obtained BA and MA from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After pursuing studies at the University of California-Berkeley and Caltech (where he helped edit the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein), Jeremy completed his PhD in history of science at Princeton University. He was elected a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, before joining the Cornell faculty.
Jeremy’s teaching and research explore the history of science in early modern Europe (1500–1800), emphasizing pre-modern ways of knowing earth, life, and environment. His first book, The Graveyard of Shells: Extinction in Early Modern Europe, examines how – long before the discovery of the dinosaurs – a range of actors conceived the extinction of species through fossilized seashells. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, it makes an intervention in the history of science by recovering debates about natural and manmade extinction in the centuries preceding Cuvier.
He is also in the very early stages of developing a second book project. It seeks to analyze visually impaired knowers from naturalists to mathematicians, reconstructing how blind practitioners used their nonvisual senses – particularly touch – to study and observe the natural world.
Jeremy’s research has been recognized with various prizes, including the Ronald Rainger Prize by the History of Science Society, Trevor Levere Prize by Annals of Science, and Mary & Randall '69 Hack Award by the High Meadows Environmental Institute. His scholarship has been supported by the DAAD, National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Folger Shakespeare Library, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, and Warburg Institute in London. In 2024 the German Society for the History and Theory of Biology honored him for his contributions to the history of biology with the Caspar Friedrich Wolff Medal.
A brief CV can be found here.
Research Focus
- History of Science and Medicine
- Intellectual
- Environmental
- Material and Visual Culture
Publications
Book-in-progress
The Graveyard of Shells: Extinction in Early Modern Europe. *Awarded the 2024 Caspar Friedrich Wolff Medal (see citation).
Articles
'Hunted to Extinction: Finding Lost Species in the World of Bernard Palissy (1510–89).' Renaissance Quarterly 77, 2 (2024), 493-528. *Awarded the 2023 Ronald Rainger Prize (see citation).
'Scripting Speech: A Manuscript Declamation in Sixteenth-Century Humanism.' History of Universities 35, 2 (2022): 16–83.
'The First Mite: Insect Genealogy in Hooke's Micrographia.' Annals of Science 75, 3 (2018): 165–200. *Awarded the 2017 Trevor Levere Prize (see citation).
Reviews
Review of Ivano dal Prete, “On the Edge of Eternity: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Modern History 97, 2 (2025), 465–6.
Review of Francesco G. Sacco, 'Real, Mechanical, Experimental. Robert Hooke's Natural Philosophy.' Isis 112, 4 (2021): 833–4.