Dr Amelia Urry

Dr Amelia Urry is the Lumley Research Fellow in History of Science at Magdalene College.

Dr Urry earned her BA in English literature and poetry composition at Yale University in 2013, producing both a dissertation on Modernist epistolary style and a poetry collection supervised by Louise Glück. In this time, she also co-authored a textbook of fractal geometry with the mathematician Michael Frame, which was published as Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, Imagined by Yale University Press in 2016.

She then worked as a science journalist in Seattle, WA, reporting on a wide variety of topics, including coral reefs, plastic pollution, and energy technologies. As an editor at Grist Magazine, she helped oversee special projects and long-form features. Her reporting won recognition and fellowships from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, and her articles and essays have appeared in outlets including the Washington Post, Atmos Magazine, and Wired.

In 2019, she came to Cambridge for an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and stayed on to complete her PhD in early 2025. Her thesis, which was co-supervised between HPS and the Scott Polar Research Institute, developed an account of evolving concepts of scientific uncertainty in 20th-century Antarctic glaciology, from the "blank" maps of the early International Geophysical Year to the coining of the "Doomsday Glacier" by a climate journalist visiting Antarctica in 2017.

As a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene, she will carry out new research into the role that scientific narratives of apocalypse have played in shaping the modern climate sciences. In the 1970s, stories of global famine and nuclear winter were omnipresent in both expert and lay publications, at the same time as the practices of computational atmospheric modeling and forecasting were developing. Across history, the figure of catastrophe, whether conveyed via divine judgement, deadly comet, or climate disruption, provides a narrative device for compressing Earth history to human timescales. The resulting transformation of scientific debates about slow-moving geological forces into fiery social drama mirrors the process by which the accelerated release of stored carbon has translated planetary processes into a potent political problematic.

Research Interests

• History of Technology
• Environmental History
• 20th Century British and American History

Qualifications

• 2020-2024. PhD in History and Philosophy of Science & Polar Studies; Gates Cambridge Scholarship
• 2019-2020. MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science
• 2013. BA in English Literature and Writing

Career/Research Highlights

• Arctic Circle Art + Science Residency, October 2023
• Cambridge CRASSH Research Network ‘Remote Sensing: Ice, Instruments, Imagination’, September 2022-2023
• UK Antarctic Heritage Trust & the British Society for the History of Science Engagement Fellowship, June-October 2021
• Society for the History of Natural History, Stearn Essay Prize, September 2020