Today at Brown

The design and accuracy of ancient clocks in Babylonia and China.

Eclipse prediction in Mesopotamia.

“A New Scheme from Uruk for the Retrograde Arc of Mars.”

As a scholar of ancient astronomy, John Steele has written papers on these topics and many, many more.

Steele focuses on the development and practice of astronomy in the ancient world and its role in ancient societies.

“My main area of research is into Babylonian astronomy, looking at the very earliest stages of the development of astronomy as a science of prediction,” Steele said. “I've recently also been involved in work on the Antikythera Mechanism, a mechanical device for computing astronomical phenomena found on an ancient Roman shipwreck.”

Steele, whose undergraduate degree is in physics, first became interested in the history of science while studying the European renaissance: Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler. “But my Ph.D, supervisor, Richard Stephenson at Durham University, first drew me toward ancient astronomy,” Steele said.

“And when I realized how many ancient scientific texts had never been read by modern scholars, I found it fascinating to be the first person to look at a text and sometimes to be able to understand the details of how ancient astronomers worked.”

For the last four years, Steele has served as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at his alma mater, the University of Durham in northeast England. He has held other fellowships there, at the University of Toronto and 10 years ago at M.I.T.

Brown’s legacy in Steele’s field drew this British citizen back to the States.

“Brown has a unique history of research into the ancient exact sciences, starting with Otto Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs in the 1940s, through to Gerald Toomer and most recently David Pingree who died in 2005,” Steele said.

“The chance to continue the Brown tradition of research into ancient astronomy, and to be able to teach this field to a new generation of scholars, was too good an opportunity to turn down.”