ProfessorRoy MacLeod

OAM, AB Harvard University; PhD, Litt D Cambridge University

Roy MacLeod is Professor Emeritus of (Modern) History at the University of Sydney. He was educated in history, the biochemical sciences, and the history of science at Harvard University (summa cum laude); in the sociology of knowledge at the London School of Economics; and in modern history and history of science at Cambridge University, where he took the Ph.D degree in 1967. In 2001, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Cambridge, and in 2005, the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Bologna. In 2015, he received the Sarton Medal from the University of Ghent. In 2003, he was awarded the Centennial of Federation Medal for services to Australian Society, and in 2020, received the Medal of the Order of Australia, for services to Education and History.

Graduating from Harvard College (summa cum laude) in 1963, Roy MacLeod was elected the first Junior Research Fellow in History at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1966, and in the same year became a founding Fellow of the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. In 1970, he was appointed foundation Reader (and Chairman) in the History and Social Studies of Science at Sussex, and remained a Senior Fellow of SPRU until 1978. Between 1978 and 1982, he held the foundation chair in Science Education at the Institute of Education in London University. 1982, he moved to Sydney, where for twenty years until his retirement in 2003, he taught social, economic, and cultural history; Australian and Commonwealth history; medical history; military history; nuclear history; museum studies; the history of higher education; and the history of science and technology in Europe, India, Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific.

Since the 1970s, he has held visiting research and teaching positions in history and the history of science at several institutions, including Indiana University (Bloomington), the Free University (Amsterdam), Harvard, Cambridge (Pembroke College, Clare Hall, and Wolfson College); Oxford (Christ Church, Magdalen, and St. John's colleges); and Canberra (History of Ideas, ANU). He has taught cultural history at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Idêhistoria at the University of Umeå; university history at the University of Oslo; and the history of science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he has several times been a directeur d'etudes associé. He has been invited to lecture in India, Korea, China, Singapore, and Japan, and has been a consultant to the Nobel Foundation, the IDP, the ARC, the ADI, the Australian Antarctic Division, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, OECD, and UNESCO. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship and Hon. Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Cambridge; a Regents' Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution; an Edelstein International Fellowship in the History of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; a Rhône-Poulenc Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science and the Ministère des Affaires Ètrangères of France; and the Fowler Hamilton Fellowship of Christ Church, Oxford. In 2008, he returned to the Chemical Heritage Foundation as a Gordon Cain Senior Fellow in Technology, Policy and Entrepreneurship. In 2009, he held a Senior Braudel Fellowship in the History of Culture at the European University Institute in Florence, and in 2010, held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In 2011, he was appointed a Fellow-in-Residence at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen and, in 2012, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and the Global Security Institute at the University of Durham. In 2013, he was awarded the Keeley Visiting Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, and in 2017, a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 2019, he was elected an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Society at University College London.

In 1978, Roy MacLeod co-founded the Research Centre for History of Science and Technology (RCHST) at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and in 1985, co-founded the Pacific Circle, a Scientific Commission of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, of which he is currently Senior Vice President. At Sydney University, he was a founding member of the University's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS), and founded the Centre for the Human Aspects of Science and Technology (CHAST). He was a founding member of the Research Institute on Asia and the Pacific (RIAP). Since 1983, he has been an Honorary Associate of the School of History and Philosophy of Science, and since 2007, an Honorary Associate of the Centre for International Security Studies. In 2018, he became an Hon. Member of the Sydney Nanoscience Institute.

He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Historical Society of England, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Royal Society of New South Wales. In 2015, he was elected afull Member of the International Academy of the History of Science (Paris).

In 2007, he was awarded a Humboldt Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, which enabled him to work at the universities of Heildelberg and Hamburg, and at the Institut für Technikzukünfte at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 2008, he was inivted to deliver the Bernal Lecture at Birkbeck College, London, and in 2018, the Wheeler Lecture at the Royal Society of Chemistry, London.

In 1971, he co-founded the international journal Social Studies of Science (Sage), and was its co-editor until 1991. Between 1990 and 2000, he served on the Editorial Board of Minerva: Science, Learning and Policy (Springer Verlag), and was its Editor-in-Chief between 2000 and 2008. He now serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Pacific Circle Bulletin (Honolulu) and Health and History (Sydney). He was a member of the College of Expert Reviewers of the European Science Foundation from 2016-2019.

Roy MacLeod is the author or editor of twenty-five books and about 150 articles in the social history of science, medicine and technology; military history, museum and cultural history, nuclear history, research policy, and the history of higher education. He has held several national research grants from France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom, and from the Australian Research Council. His books include Archibald Liversidge, FRS: Imperial Science under the Southern Cross (Sydney: University of Sydney Press and the Royal Society of New South Wales, 2009), and For Science, King and Country: The Life and Legacy of Henry Moseley (ed., 2018). A full list of articles and books, and details of current projects, are available upon request.