Dr James Poskett, Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology, has been awarded the 2020 President’s Book Prize by the Social Science History Association for Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920 (Chicago, 2019).

This prize is "awarded annually for a meritorious first work by an early-career scholar. Entrants are judged on scholarly significance, interdisciplinary reach, and methodological innovativeness within monographs analyzing past structures and events and change over time.”

Materials of the Mind is a global history of science, race, and the mind in the nineteenth century. It shows how the circulation of skulls, plaster casts, letters and photographs underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind.