Matthew Holmes is a historian of science and the environment. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Stavanger. Matthew is the author of The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), and his articles on the modern history of biology and natural history have appeared in such journals as Technology and Culture, History of Science, Environment and History, and The British Journal for the History of Science.
At KWI, Matthew will work on his second book project, Avian Engineers: Animal Minds and Technology in America. Avian Engineers examines scientific debates over the intelligence of birds in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and argues that technology played a central role in shaping contemporary beliefs about the abilities and limitations of animal minds. Avian Engineers describes how ornithologists, psychologists, and nature writers used technological analogies to explain bird behaviours like nest building, tool use, and migration. It also charts how Americans closely observed the interactions of birds with human technology, particularly in urban spaces, where the ability of wild birds to live alongside buildings and infrastructure was seen as an early sign of domestication.