I was educated at the University of Cambridge, where I gained a BA and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, before getting a PhD at the Warburg Institute at University of London.

I worked as a curator at The British Library during my doctoral research, and then held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2009-2012) at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 2012-18 I taught at Western Connecticut State University, where I was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor. Since 2018, I have been a research fellow at Brown, Johns Hopkins, and Utrecht Universities.

In July 2020 I joined the Board of Directors of The Renaissance Society of America, where I serve as Fellowships Chair.

In December 2022 I transcended the academy in order to work full-time as a writer of trade-list books, essays, and articles, and as a monster consultant for film and television. I shall continue to write occasional academic articles in order send into the world the mountain of half-written-up discoveries on my laptop. I am represented in things literary by the wonderful Roz Foster at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in New York City.

As a researcher, my work explores the histories of science, art, and ideas: the connections between Europe, the Americas, and the wider world; exploration, empires and colonialism, collecting and display, monstrosity, the history of anthropology from antiquity to the nineteenth century, and especially c.1400-1800. My work has been generously supported by the Johns Hopkins University, the John Carter Brown Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, and the Leverhulme Trust.

When I am not poking around universities, libraries, museums or archives, I may be experimenting with sourdough cultures or with jazz piano riffs. I tweet - as @SurekhaDavies - and toot - as @SurekhaDavies@historians.social - and post photos on Instagram - as @surekhadavies - about art, science, and ideas, and how about exploring the world before 1800 offers us tools for thinking about global agendas of the future.