People Details

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

A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now

W. W. Norton, 2025

Collecting The World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum

Harvard University Press, 2017

The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820

Science History Publications/USA, 2009

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

Routledge, 2007

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

Harvard, 2006

• A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now (W.W. Norton & Quercus, 2025; Penguin Random House Audiobook)
• Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Penguin and Harvard, 2017). Penguin Paperback 2018, Harvard Paperback 2019, Chinese and Taiwan Translations in progress.
• The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, co-editor with Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts and Kapil Raj (Science History Publications, 2009).
• Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, co-editor with Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2007).
• A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard, 2006).
• “All Aboard the Ark.” On Collecting and Empires: An Historical and Global Perspective, ed. Maia Wellington Gahtan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg (London: Harvey Miller Publishers/ Brepols, 2019): London Review of Books: forthcoming.
• “The Knowing World: A New Global History of Science,” History of Science 57 (2019): 373-399.
• “Sounding the Abyss.” On Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke, 2019): Times Literary Supplement, 1 November 2019, p. 29.
• “Collect or Die,” invited commentary on “How Collections End,” ed. Boris Jardine, Jenny Bangham & Emma Kowal, special issue, British Journal for the History of Science Themes 4 (2019): 273-281.
• “From Here to Infinity.” On Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool (Rizzoli, 2019) and The Swimming Pool in Photography (Hatje Cantz, 2018): Literary Review, July 2019, pp. 20-1.
• “Scientific Rebirth.” On the film Genesis 2.0, dir. Christian Frei & Maxim Abugaev, 2018: Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 May 2019.
• “The Art of PyŏkPyŏk.” Sunglim Kim, Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art, University of Washington Press, 2018: Literary Review, April 2019.
• “When a Muslim Visits Space.” Jörg Matthias Determann, Space Science and the Arab World, IB Tauris, 2018: Times Literary Supplement, 4 January 2019.
• “No More easyJet: On Bruno Latour’s Où Atterrir?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 September 2018.
• “Andrea Fraser Follows the Money.” Review of Andrea Fraser, 2016 in Museums, Money and Politics (MIT Press, 2018): Apollo Magazine, July-August 2018.
• “Performances of Museum Storage,” in Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, ed. Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh, Routledge Museum Studies Series: in press.
• “The Sordid History of Antiquities Collectors.” Review of Erin Thompson, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, Yale University Press, 2016: The Atlantic, 6 June 2016.
• “Rockstars und (sich) Bewegende Bilder” [“Rock Stars and Moving Pictures”]. Neuesmuseum die österreichische museumszeitschrift (2016): 48-53.
• “Neugier, horror und freiheit im wunderkammer.” Assoziationsraum Wunderkammer, herausgegeben von Nike Baetzner, eine Publikation der Franckeschen Stiftungen und der Burg Giebichenstein, Kunsthochschule Halle, Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle, Germany, 2015.
• “Art in the New Plutocracy.” Review of Charles Molesworth, The Capitalist and the Critic: JP Morgan, Roger Fry, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (U-Texas Press, 2016), Chronicle of Higher Education Review: March 2016.
• “Rise of the Clutterologists.” Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in American Culture, University of Chicago Press, 2014. Chronicle of Higher Education Review: March 2015.
• "Whatcha Got?" Reviews in American History (2014): 690-696.
• "Atomic Franklin," Raritan Quarterly 33 (2014): 27-39.
• "Triumph of the Strange," Chronicle Review, 13 December 2013.
• "Art is For Lovers," Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 July 2013.
• "Introduction" and "Listing People," in "Listmania": Isis Focus Section (Dec. 2012): 710-752.
• "The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World," Atlantic Studies 9 (June 2012): 185-208.
• "Collecting Hans Sloane," in From Books to Bezoars (London: British Library Books, 2012).
• “Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water,” History of Science 49 (June 2011): 149-185.
• “What’s in the Box?” Cabinet Magazine 41 (April 2011).
• “The Electrical Machine in the American Garden” and introduction, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, co-ed. Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2007), 255-280, 1-28.

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.