Our Team
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Prof. Rebecca Woods - Project Lead
Rebecca Woods is an historian of science, environment, and animals. She holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a tenured professor jointly appointed to the Department of History and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She is the author of The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (2017), which examined the role of British breeds of sheep and cattle in imperial expansion in the 19th century. Her current work on the history of frozen mammoths from the circumpolar north since 1800 is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
In 2018 she was a visiting scholar in Department III at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. From 2013 to 2016 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities.
Follow her on Bluesky @professorbopeep.bsky.social
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Alexander Offord - Researcher
Alexander is currently a freelance researcher in the history of science. He joined the team in 2018 and has worked on database, mapping, and podcast projects for the Lab. He is also an award-winning playwright and theatre artist, and the co-founder of the performance company Good Old Neon, with his partner Nicole Wilson.
Follow him on twitter @offordwrites
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Chloe Chaitov - Researcher
Chloe holds a Master of Information (MI) in Archives and Records Management and Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto, where she also earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Her research interests include animal-human histories of taxidermy, collection, and information practices. Since 2022, Chloe has been a member of the MHL where she investigates the movement and display of real and model mammoth specimens.
MHL Alumni
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Jan Hua-Henning - Assistant Professor, Duke Kunshan University
Jan Hua-Henning was a member of the MHL 2018-2022. While working for the project, he investigated mammoth skin and flesh in Germany’s natural history museums; and researched and translated German primary sources.
Jan is now an Assistant Professor at Duke Kunshan University in Shanghai, where he teaches the history of technology, risk, and emergency response since c. 1800.
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Oksana Dudko - PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Toronto
Oksana was a member of the MHL 2021-22. She is an historian of 20th-century Europe with a special focus on violence; gender; and the cultural history of Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Oksana also holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in history (Ph.D. equivalent) from Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine (2011).
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Dylan Wilkerson - Researcher, Latin Translation
Dylan was a member of the MHL 2021-2023. He is in the final phase of completing a PhD dissertation at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. His dissertation recounts the intellectual history of early medieval Britain with a particular emphasis on the reception of classical literature in Canterbury, England, 650-1100 CE. His general interests include theories of translation, multilingualism, and institutional practices of interpretive glossing and textual commentary. He also produce modern English translations of Latin texts composed during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
While in the MHL, Dylan worked on an original translation of the German naturalist Tilesius’s notes on the 1799 Adams Mammoth.
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Marcus Forbes-Green
Marcus is an undergraduate student completing his final year of study in the University of Toronto's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. His research interests include history of science, paleoecology, arctic science, soils, peatlands, and Latin/classical studies. He is also a research assistant with the Finkelstein paleoecology lab in the Department of Geography and Planning, in which he will be pursuing an MSc. in 2022-24.