Dr Thomas Dixon
Senior Lecturer in History
email: t.m.dixon@qmul.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7882 8425
Dr Thomas Dixon joined the Department in 2007. His first degree was in Theology and Religious Studies (Cambridge), and he has an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science from Imperial College, London. His PhD (Cambridge) was a study of the history of theories of passions and emotions. Between 2000 and 2003, Dr Dixon held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cambridge, and from 2004 to 2007 he was a Lecturer in History at Lancaster University.
Dr Dixon is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the International Society for Science and Religion, as well as serving on the editorial boards of Journal of Victorian Culture and Nineteenth Century Studies. His book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction won the 2009 Dingle Prize, awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science for the best book in the field accessible to a non-specialist readership.
Dr Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, and a member of the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought.
Research interests:
Dr Dixon has pursued three related strands of research: the history of theories of passions and emotions; the history of debates about ‘altruism’, especially in Victorian Britain; and, more generally, the history of relationships between science and religion (a subject on which he has written a Very Short Introduction). He is interested in ‘historical semantics’, or ‘word history’, and in the cultural history of British philosophy. His current project investigates the histories of Stoicism and weeping in modern Britain.
Two of his essay-reviews for the Times Literary Supplement are available online: one is on the philosophy of emotion, the other on science and religion. An article for History Today about Darwinism and religion in Britain and America is available online here. A review of Dr Dixon's book The Invention of Altruism (2008) can be read online at IHR Reviews in History.
Postgraduate supervision:
Dr Dixon is interested in hearing from students interested in writing dissertations and theses on topics that would fall under the following headings:
- Intellectual, religious and cultural life of nineteenth-century Britain.
- History of the passions and emotions.
- History of medicine, psychiatry, and sexuality.
- History of science and religion.
- History of modern philosophy, especially in Britain and America.
- History of unbelief.
- Political thought.
Publications:
(ed.) Thomas Brown: Selected Philosophical Writings (Imprint Academic, forthcoming 2010).
Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008).
'Patients and Passions: Languages of Medicine and Emotion, 1789-1850', in Fay Bound Alberti (ed.), Medicine, Emotion, and Disease, 1750-1950 (Palgrave, 2006), pp 22-52.
'Religion and Science', in John Hinnells (ed), The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005), pp 456-472; second edition (2009), pp. 509-525.
'The Invention of Altruism: Auguste Comte's Positive Polity and Respectable Unbelief in Victorian Britain', in D Knight and M Eddy (eds), Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp 195-211.
How to Get a First: The Essential Guide to Academic Success (London: Routledge, 2004).
'Agnosticism', 'Altruism' and 'Natural Theology', in Maryanne Cline Horowitz (ed), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner's, 2004).
'Herbert Spencer and Altruism: The Sternness and Kindness of a Victorian Moralist', in Greta Jones and Robert A. Peel (eds), Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy (London: Galton Institute, 2004), pp 85-124.
(ed) The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Brown (1778-1820), 8 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003).
'Looking beyond "the rumpus about Moses and monkeys": Religion and the Sciences in the Nineteenth Century', Nineteenth-Century Studies, 17 (2003), 25-33.
‘Scientific Atheism as a Faith Tradition', Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33 (2002), 337-59.
Undergraduate teaching:
Victorian Values: Religion Sex, Race, and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Level 2)
Historiographical Essay (Level 2)