Trevor Levere

Trevor Levere

Fellow: Awarded 1983
Field of Study: History of Science and Technology

Competition: US & Canada

University of Toronto

Trevor Harvey Levere joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1968, where he taught until his retirement in 1987.  He was Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of science and Technology from 1981 to 1986, and again from 1993 to 1998.  He is currently University Professor Emeritus at the Institute. He has written eight books, including Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (2001); Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration 1818-1918 (1993); Poetry Realized in Nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (1981); and Affinity and Matter. Elements of Chemical Philosophy 1800-1865 (1971). He has edited five books, including Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, with F. L. Holmes, and Nature, Experiment, and the Sciences, with W. Shea (2000). He has also written approximately eighty articles and chapters in books.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, membre effectif de l’Académie internationale d’histoire des sciences (Paris), and a Foreign Member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij de Wetenschappen (Royal Holland Society of Sciences).  He has been awarded research fellowships by the Centre national de recherche scientifique, Paris, the Dibner Institute, MIT; the Japan society for the Promotion of Science; the University of Göttingen; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; and Clare Hall, Cambridge.  He was awarded a D.Litt. by Oxford University, and a Killam Snior Research Fellowship by the Canada Council. In 2009 the Division of the History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society honored him with its Sidney M. Edelstein Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry.

He is Editor of Annals of Science, and coeditor of the Ashgate series Science, Technology and Culture 1700-1945.  His current research is on Dr. Thomas Beddoes and his circle, and on the role of instruments in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chemistry.

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