I am an experienced speaker and have given keynote lectures and research talks at a variety of institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Caltech, Stanford, Cambridge, and Oxford universities.

These talks have addressed such themes as: science, technology, and society; the origins and politics of museums; anthropology and empire; cartography and the age of exploration; the history of the idea of the human; art history and book history – and, of course, what ideas about monsters can tell us about humanity’s past, the present, and future.

If you’d like to invite me to give a keynote lecture or research presentation, or to arrange a corporate or policy talk, please get in touch by writing to me here.

The Monster Collectors. The Seltzer Memorial Lecture, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2024, University of Toronto, Canada.

Costume Books and the Making of Race in Early Modern Europe. Keynote Lecture, “Race and the Early Modern” conference, King’s College, University of London, UK.

Sea Monsters, Sensory Distance, and Mapping Nature. Lorentz Dietrichson Lecture, 2021, Norwegian Association of Art Historians, Oslo, Norway.