Lecturer in History

Biography

Guy Sechrist is an historian of science and medicine. Hailing from Pennsylvania, he has spent nearly a decade in Britain receiving both his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research addresses the relationship between science and commerce, with particular interest in how material and scientific knowledge-making practices influenced trade, financial instruments, and systems of collection.

More broadly, Guy focuses on the importance of practical mathematics, scientific instrumentation, and collection and transportation of economically viable specimens from around the world. Ultimately, he explores how global networks of trade and commercial problems of scale intersect at the crossroads of measurement, calculation and finance in the early-modern world. The primary aim of his research has been to further examine how frameworks of knowledge-making became transactional.

His doctoral thesis, Gauging a State, investigates the material and mathematical practices of barrel gauging throughout England in the seventeenth century – a practice which he shows developed out of the state’s necessity to calculate and collect revenue from customs and excise tax. Such a practice was so vital to the nation’s burgeoning economy.

Education