Surekha Davies Keynote Speaker

Historian of science, cultural critic, and public speaker
Author of Humans: A Monstrous History (2025) and the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters
Historical monster consultant (film, TV, radio)

Surekha Davies's Biography

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British speaker, historical monster consultant, and historian of science, empire, and geographical exploration. She is the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025), one of History Today’s “Best Books of the Year 2025”, and the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press).

A graduate of Robinson College, Cambridge, Surekha has an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She has been a Curator in the British Library Map Library, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of London, and held faculty and research positions in the UK, the US, Germany, and The Netherlands at institutions including the Library of Congress and Brown University. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America, as Fellowships Chair.

She has given public lectures, keynotes, research talks, and conference presentations at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU, Cambridge, and Oxford universities, the Science History Institute (Philadelphia), the Huntington Library (San Marino), the Institute for Psychoanalysis (London), the Linnean Society (London), and institutions and professional associations in Amsterdam, Berlin, Oslo, Paris, Toronto, and beyond. In 2025 she spoke at the Edinburgh International Festival and The British Library’s HistFest.

Humans: A Monstrous History is a history of humanity from antiquity to the present, told through ideas about monsters and monster-making. It explores major questions at the crossroads of science and society. Humans appeared in Chinese (traditional characters) in 2026; additional translations and international editions are contracted for publication.

Her writing has appeared the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science Magazine, Aeon, Reactor, and elsewhere.

A Brief History of Humankind through our Stories about Monsters

Why do humans invent monsters? This talk reveals the origins of the idea of the human and how urgent questions around labour, technology, and human rights rest on an ancient foundation of ideas about monsters. Through a unique blend of history, anthropology, and cultural criticism, Surekha shows how we can build a better future by learning to recognize “monstrification” and replacing it with “monstrofuturism.”

The Monster Collectors: Hidden histories of biology, medicine, and anthropology

In this fast-paced story of museums, experiments, heists, and freak shows, Surekha shows how Western ideas about the category of the human and the parameters of normal arose out of the science of monsters, and offers a framework for change geared towards greater equity.

The case against genAI: literacy, storehouses of knowledge, and the future of democracy

GenAI companies claim their products expand access to knowledge, but in fact they introduce new barriers between users and storehouses of knowledge. Surekha draws on decades of experience as a map curator, history professor and historian of science to offer a framework for thinking strategically about education in order to strengthen democracy, and shows how the way we think about AI affects what we think it means to be human.

Media revolutions from the invention of writing to AI

Human history is studded with media breakthroughs that shaped the nature and scale of the ways we have created, stored, and shared information. This talk offers lessons for understanding today’s innovations from a dive into earlier innovations like the book and the printing press.

Information and propaganda at the dawn of printing in the West

European oceanic voyages expanded the world for Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Simultaneously the Catholic church fractured, giving rise to Protestant sects and tearing apart kingdoms. This talk reveals how the printing press became a central technology for creating, adapting, synthesizing, weaponizing, and disseminating ideas. Surekha applies insights from visually arresting materials ranging from world maps to caricatures of the Pope to offer a framework for understanding information, propaganda, and visual literacy today.

The Monster in the Mirror: art, literature, and creativity

Surekha draws on masterpieces from art and literature to show how a society’s monsters help us understand their deepest fears.

Her compelling lectures equip leaders with the necessary frameworks for strategic thinking, revealing how we got here and how our choices will shape where humanity will head next.
She integrates deep academic research and intellectual authority as a field-changing historian with charismatic speaking, incorporating vivid stories and extraordinary visual materials from two decades of research in archives and museums.
Her tailored keynotes bring historical depth to understanding today’s challenges and enable organizations and individuals to navigate change, unpacking persistent myths and assumptions about society and modernity, and translating lessons from Humans: A Monstrous History into actionable insights.
Her talks equip audiences with a new framework for recognizing and replacing narratives that push societies towards greater inequality and extremism, revealing how monster-making is a storytelling process with legacies in politics, law, international relations, science, medicine, technology, education, and society.
For novelists, screenwriters, and game developers, creating compelling heroes and villains involves understanding how monsters are our doppelgangers. Surekha’s expertise in hidden archives and monster archetypes offer keys for developing memorable characters, believable villains, and gripping story arcs.