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Dr Seb Falk

College position(s)

Senior Admissions Tutor, Director of Studies, Fellow, Praelector, Tutor

Subject

History, Cambridge Foundation Year

Specialising in

History of Science

Degrees, Awards and Prizes

B.A. (Oxford), PGCE (Buckingham), MPhil (Cambridge), PhD (Cambridge).  

Research themes

I research the history of science. I am particularly interested in how science and technology work in practice, including hands-on use of instruments and production of books. I also research how science is communicated across cultures, and the relationships between science and religion, and science and literature.

My first book, The Light Ages, was published in 2020. It was a Book of the Year in several publications including The Times, The TLS and The Telegraph. It won the American Astronomical Society’s Osterbrock Prize 2025, and was shortlisted for the Hughes Prize of the British Society for the History of Science.

More recently, with another Girton Fellow, James Wade, I published an article that radically reinterpreted a classic lost text of medieval English literature, The Song of Wade. This received worldwide media attention; you can read – and watch a short video – about it on the Cambridge University website. 

My next research project is a global history of navigation. Drawing on my own sailing experience, I circumnavigate the world explaining how humans have grappled with the problem of finding out where they are, where they’re going, and why that has mattered.

Roles within the University

  • University Proctor

Other

I studied History and Spanish at Oxford and worked in the UK Civil Service, and as a teacher in the UK and Canada, before turning to historical research and university teaching.

I am also an Offshore Yachtmaster and RYA Shorebased and Cruising Instructor, and have taught navigation and practical sailing skills for the University Yacht Club.

In 2016 I was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. I have presented and appeared on various BBC radio programmes, as well as podcasts such as You’re Dead to Me, History Hit and The Rest is History.
 

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