Daniel Lewis

Background

About Daniel Lewis

I work as a full-time endowed senior curator of the history of science and technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum & Botanical Gardens in Southern California—and in a related vein—am a writer, college professor, and environmental historian. At the Huntington, I manage the documentary heritage (rare books, archival collections) related to modern (>1800) history of science and technology, working broadly across the natural and physical sciences. I write mostly about the biological sciences and their intersections with evolution, policy, culture, history, politics, law, and literature. I hold the PhD in History and have had postdocs at Oxford, the Smithsonian, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and elsewhere. My 2012 book (The Feathery Tribe, Yale) was about the study of birds in the late 19th century and what it meant to be a professional after Darwinian evolution provided the mechanism for biological change. My 2018 book (Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai'i, also with Yale) is an environmental history of extinction and survival among the avifauna of my native state, told in four species; it questions notions of purity among humans and animals. My new book (Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of our Future) is a conservation and climate change story, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in early 2024. I'm also a consulting author for McGraw-Hill Education's K-7 social studies textbooks. I'm represented by Wendy Strothman of the Strothman Agency in NYC for my writing projects. From 2010 to 2016 I served as Chief Curator of Manuscripts at the Huntington, overseeing 20 curators, archivists, and catalogers. My exhibit "Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World" was named as the best exhibition in America by the AAM the year after it opened in 2008. Between then and its closure in 2020, more than 3 million people visited it. A major new version is underway. In a strange turn, I also won an Emmy in 2020, as a producer for KCET's "Women in Aerospace" program. I have a faculty appointment at Caltech, where I teach environmental humanities courses to upper-division undergrads. I'm also on the faculty at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, teaching courses on the history of automotive design, history of transportation, and environmental history and humanities topics. Each January I teach a 3-week course on birds in fragile global ecosystems at NYU Abu Dhabi. I'm also a Commissioner for the IUCN's Species Survival Commission, as a Bird Red List Authority member, 2021-2025.