Associate Professor
Chair
Department of Science, Technology and Society
218A Bethune College
jelwick@yorku.ca / stschair@yorku.ca
I'm currently working on a history of students who cheat on their tests and other school assessments. Although people worry about academic integrity today, my archival work is showing that even in the 1880s students were cheating on exams and other assessments. They did so to earn credentials such as high school certificates.
Student cheating and academic integrity can be better understood against this context of an increasingly competitive quest to earn credentials. Not does this word denote degrees, licenses, or report cards; I take "credentials" to mean even the result of a single test necessary to pass a course.
By seeing cheating as a strategy to gain credentials, we not only learn more about cheating; we also learn more about the taken-for-granted documents we use to identify experts and other "people who know things." This can help us better understand the public trust placed in these credentials; we may even be able to develop better ways to assess and certify knowledge, skill, and expertise. This history is informed by STS scholarship on expertise and experience, commensuration and metrics, and infrastructure.
My most recent book was a history of standardized examinations. It especially focuses on the "arms races" between examiners and the students writing their tests. My earlier writings are on the history of the life sciences, such as how now-forgotten concerns about biological individuality help explain the work of the evolutionary polymath Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).
Between 2006 and 2018 I was coordinator, then co-General Editor, of The Correspondence of John Tyndall.
Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing (University of Toronto Press, 2021).
How examinations spread across the British Empire and worked as 'cameras' to assess achievement or 'engines' to drive educational change...and sometimes both.
- One discussion of the book is here.
- An animated presentation of some of the book's main conclusions is below.
Styles of Reasoning in British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820-1858, Book 1 of the Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain series (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); reissued as paperback, 2020.
How biological individuality moved from being a 'hot topic' in biology and medical research...to a forgotten one.
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, volumes 1-5 (2015-2018), co-General Editor (with Sir Roland Jackson, Bernard Lightman, and Michael Reidy). University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015 –
Elwick, Lightman and Reidy, "General Introduction," The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 1, pp. xvii-xxiv.
7436 letters of the physicist who was (until recently thought to have been) the discoverer that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Co-Editor (with David Amigoni). The Evolutionary Epic. Volume 4 of the Victorian Science and Literature reprint series, edited by Gowan Dawson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
"Knowing the same things: mass examinations, credentials, and infrastructures of shared knowledge," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 48:2, 2023, 202-215.
"Sameness, schools, and satire," Metascience 31, 2022, 343–349, as part of an organized symposium on Making a Grade.
"Distrust that Particular Intuition: Resilient Essentialisms and Empirical Challenges in the History of Biological Individuality," for Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives, ed. Scott Lidgard and Lynn Nyhart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
"Containing Multitudes: Herbert Spencer, Organisms Social, and Orders of Individuality," for Herbert Spencer: Legacies, ed. Mark Francis and Michael W. Taylor (Routledge, 2014), pp. 89-110.
"Economies of Scales: Evolutionary Naturalists and the Victorian Examination Mania," for Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity, ed. Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
"Layered History: Styles of Reasoning as Stratified Conditions of Possibility," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (A), 43, 2012, 619-627.
"Styles of Reasoning in Early to Mid-Victorian Life Research: Analysis and Palaetiology," Journal of the History of Biology 40, 2007, pp. 35-69.
"The 'Philosophy of Decapitation': Analysis, Biomedical Reform, and Devolution in Bodies Politic, London 1830-1850," Victorian Studies 47.2, 2005, pp. 174-187.
"Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism," History of Science xli (2003), pp. 35-72.
Review of Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution (Chicago, 2022), in Journal of Modern History 96:4, December 2024, pp. 959-961.
Review of Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago, 2018), in Journal of British Studies 60:1, January 2021, pp. 55-56.
Review of Peter J. Bowler, Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (Chicago, 2013), in Review of Metaphysics 70:1, 2016, pp. 123-124.
Review of William J. Reese, Testing Wars in the Public Schools: a Forgotten History, in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50:3, Summer 2014, pp. 323-324.
Review of Steve Jones, The Darwin Archipelago: the Naturalist's Career beyond Origin of Species (Yale, 2011), in Victorian Studies 56.2, Winter 2014, p. 346-348.
Review of Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life, in Isis 99, 2008, p. 423.
Teaching
Faculty of Science Excellence in Teaching Awards, 2011, 2018
Undergraduate courses taught include
SC/NATS 1690 6.00, Evolution
SC/NATS 1765 6.00, Science, Experts and Citizens
SC/STS 2010, History of Modern Science
SC/STS 2411, Exploring Science, Technology and Society
SC/STS 3740, How Darwinism Developed: a History of Evolutionary Biology
Graduate courses taught include:
GS/STS 5001 3.0, Introduction to Science and Technology Studies
GS/STS 6309 3.0, Objectivity and its Alternatives