Grace Exley

Munby Fellow in Bibliography 2025-27

Division: Special Collections

Grace Exley completed her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2025. Titled 'Coming Out of the Shadows: Women and Geology at Oxford, 1813-1914', her AHRC-funded doctoral project charted women's engagement with the earth sciences in and around the University of Oxford in the nineteenth century. This research sought to understand why women undertook particular forms of labour (for example, illustration, curation, and collaborative authorship) in the earth sciences, and to understand the intellectual and practical significance of women's activities on the making of geological knowledge.

Before her time at Leeds, Grace completed her BA and MSci degrees at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as Secretary to the British Society for the History of Science Conferences Committee, and co-ordinated the Society's 2025 Postgraduate Conference in Leeds.

Munby Fellow Project

Women in the Margins: Unearthing the Hidden Female Contributors to Nineteenth-Century Scientific Publications in Cambridge’s Collections

As Munby Fellow for 2025-7, Grace will use Cambridge's collections to explore women's contributions to scientific print culture in nineteenth-century Britain. The 'Women in the Margins' project develops themes from Grace's doctoral research, particularly women's tendencies to produce scientific illustrations, engage in collaborative writing practices with male relatives, and to write in the scientific 'life and letters' genre. Piecing together evidence from various collections in the University Library and other Cambridge repositories, this project will be the first systematic study of women's contributions to scientific print culture to date, looking past single-author conventions and taking a broad view of scientific writing to reveal a new side to nineteenth-century natural history publishing.

Affiliated organisations

• Darwin College