• James Delbourgo
  • James Delbourgo
  • James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Professor
  • Degree: Ph.D., Columbia, 2003
  • Additional Degree(s): M.Phil., Cambridge, 1997 B.A., University of East Anglia, 1996
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers since 2008
  • Specialty: Early Modern Atlantic World: History of Science
  • Office: 104 Van Dyck Hall
  • Phone: 848-932-8548

 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

James Delbourgo is a historian and writer who works on collecting and museums and history of science. He was born in England to Italian parents and educated at Reigate Grammar School, the University of East Anglia, Cambridge (Christ's College) and Columbia. He previously taught at McGill and Harvard.

His latest book is A Noble Madness (2025), a cultural history of obsessive collectors from the ancient world to the present day. (“Magnificent…compulsive and entertaining” – Stephen Fry; “A tour de force of scholarship and story-telling” – Dan Weiss, Metropolitan Museum President Emeritus.) The book is published by W.W. Norton in New York and Quercus in London; audiobook read by the author, available from Penguin Random House Audio.

His 2017 book, Collecting the World, explored global natural history collecting through the career of Hans Sloane, which culminated in the foundation of the British Museum. It was based on 15 years of research in Sloane's London collections in collaboration with the British Museum.

Published by Penguin in the UK and Belknap in the US, the book won four prizes (see below), made four shortlists, and was named Book of the Week in the Guardian, London Times, Daily Mail and The Week Magazine, and one of Apollo Magazine's Books of the Year; featured in BBC Radio’s Today Programme and NPR’s Leonard Lopate Show, the British Museum and BBC History Magazine podcasts, Science Magazine and Smithsonian Magazine; and reviewed in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Republic, Financial Times, the Spectator, the Economist, the Lancet, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times, Nature Magazine and Art Quarterly.

His teaching has included collecting and museums, the Enlightenment, history of science, and Atlantic and global history.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • 506:250 Science, Collecting and Power
  • 506:251 Science and Society
  • 510:321 Age of Enlightenment
  • 512:103 Development of US I

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

 

AWARDS

  • Hughes Prize for best scholarly book in history of science accessible to the general public, British Society for the History of Science, 2019
  • Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2019
  • Leo Gershoy Award, 17th-18th Century European History, American Historical Association, 2018
  • Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2018
  • William M.B. Berger Prize in British Art History Shortlist, UK, 2018
  • Longman-History Today Shortlist, UK, 2018
  • Kenshur Prize, Indiana University, Shortlist, 2018
  • PROSE Awards, American Association of Publishers, Honorable Mention, 2018
  • Book of the Week in the Guardian, The Times (London), Daily Mail and The Week Magazine (UK)
  • An Apollo Magazine Book of the Year, 2017
  • Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Harvard University Press, for A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, 2006.
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant, “Beyond the New Atlantis,” 2005-2009.

SELECT FELLOWSHIPS

  • Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Publication Grant, 2014.
  • American Philosophical Society/British Academy Fellowship, 2013.
  • Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Fall 2013.
  • Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Fall 2011.
  • Rutgers University, Center for Cultural Analysis, 2009.
  • University of Cambridge: Visiting Fellow, CRASSH, Lent 2008.
  • University of Pennsylvania: Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center, 2001-2002.
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“Enlisting People,” in “Listmania,” Isis forum, co-ed. Staffan Müller-Wille (Dec. 2012).

“Collecting Hans Sloane,” in From Books to Bezoars (London: British Library Books, 2012)