Personal website (for lots more detail, and preprints of some papers not available below): https://isobelf.wordpress.com/about/

I am interested in the relations between maths and physics in the nineteenth century, and the interaction of both with the cultural context. I recently led a collaborative project with the University of Bonn on how we came to believe in a universal gravitational constant. I’ve recently been exploring some of Maxwell and Kelvin's work as cases of epistemic injustice. Another current project examines the ‘career’ opportunities provided by astronomy for women in the early modern period.

I lead the History for Diversity in Mathematics Network, funded by the Isaac Newton Institute. The network brings together mathematics lecturers who are interested in exploring how history of mathematics may be used to promote inclusivity in mathematics teaching at university level.

I support work on the MacTutor archive of mathematicians developed by my colleagues Edmund Robertson and John O’Connor. In 2019-20 I led an EPSRC-funded project to migrate MacTutor to a new, sustainable and more robust platform, and in 2022 for a further project to develop a team editing interface that will enable MacTutor to broaden its group of contributors, bringing in expertise in other areas of mathematics/statistics/astronomy and in international perspectives. I have also promoted the growth of MacTutor’s coverage of female and non-Western mathematicians, especially the inclusion of details of 600 African men and women with PhDs in mathematics

I am an experienced supervisor at Masters and PhD level: recently I have been supervising projects in 17th/18th century Scottish mathematics, and on the way the natural historian D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson drew on his networks of mathematicians and historians in furthering his work.

I am an executive committee member of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, elected by the International Mathematical Union. I was a Council member of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and am now Editor of its journal, the British Journal for the History of Mathematics. I was appointed an MBE by Her Majesty the Queen in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2022 for services to the history of mathematics and science.

I taught part time for the UK Open University for over 30 years. For 8 years I juggled teaching and history of mathematics research with educational research into open educational resources.

I am module coordinator for MT4501 Topics in the History of Mathematics and MT2901 Mathematical Concepts Through History (part of the Combined Studies Programme). I developed and supervised the VIP (vertically integrated project) History, Mathematics and the Public for two years; it is now being taken forward by Charles Paxton. I supervise honours projects in the history of mathematics on a wide variety of topics. I am committed to fostering research-teaching linkages and supervise around half a dozen summer project students for whom funding is available. Two current projects are:

Former projects have included "Assessing Maria Cunitz's Urania Propitia",  conducted by Farah Victoria Wallauer, a Royal Astronomical Society-funded summer scholar, and women’s access to mathematics in Scotland during the Enlightenment an honours project by Amie Morrison which has recently been published.

I am a experienced supervisor at Masters and PhD level

For eight years I was a consultant, and lecturer/senior lecturer, in learning technology, mainly at Glasgow Caledonian University, with research interests in open educational practices, and in representation of teaching practice. I was an expert advisor on the OECD-CERI project on Open Educational Resources. In 2014 I led GCU’s successful bid on the  EC-funded ExplOERer project. In 2012-13 I led the EC-funded OER4Adults project, which broke new ground in looking at the experiences of those providing open educational resources for adults in non-formal as well as formal settings. Previously I was a member of the JISC-funded Open Educational Resources Evaluation and Synthesis team, a consultant on the NTFS-funded SHARE project, and co-investigator on the Mod4L project which investigated representational models of teaching practice.

I have considerable practical experience of teaching, and developing materials for, distance education, with the UK Open University