Dr Fiona Amery
Fiona is one of our Research Fellows, and is based at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University.
Biography
Fiona grew up just outside Cambridge, and read History at the University of Exeter for her undergraduate degree. She also attended UC Berkeley in 2017, reading Middle Eastern History and Psychology. She then moved to the University of Cambridge for her MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, pursuing her interest in the history of the physical sciences and developing this through her PhD research in the same department.
Research
Fiona works on the history of atmospheric physics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in how intangible and unstable phenomena have come to be known through reproduction and imitation. Her PhD research focused on the various ways in which the aurora borealis and aurora australis were imaged, visualised and understood during the International Polar and Geophysical Years (1880–1960). In her location–based research she has seen some spectacular displays of the northern lights, on an archival trip to Tromsø and when taking part in a documentary in Ny–Ålesund on Svalbard.
Fiona has explored depictions of the aurora, from hand–drawings to radio echo images, while investigating the problem of indescribability and the imaginative and aesthetic aspects of rendering atmospheric objects. She focuses on the practices of Polar research, tracing the shifting balance between reliance on embodied and instrumental sensing. Fiona's doctoral research also touches on broader questions relating to the challenges of calibrating results across disparate Polar stations and the epistemological power of experiential knowledge.
Fiona's current research looks at the construction of atmospheric analogues in the late nineteenth century and what they tell us about competing and difficult to reconcile models of atmospheric electricity, methods of grappling with elusive and potentially illusory objects and the importance of outdoor field research to the physical sciences at the turn of the twentieth century.