IAS Fellow, XXXXXX College, October-December 2026
Contact Details
Dr Jarita Holbrook (they/them) is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a fellow of the American Astronomical Society, and the immediate past-president of the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture. They are the lead editor of “African Cultural Astronomy: Current Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Research in Africa” (2008) and the forthcoming “Indigenous Astronomy in the Space Age”. They are interdisciplinary doing cultural astronomy research incorporating ethnoastronomy and contemporary history of astrophysicists. Their documentary films “Black Suns: An Astrophysics Adventure” and “Hubble’s Diverse Universe” have won awards along with the Tenerife episode of their YouTube series, The Science Tourists, which won a webisode excellence prize.
Jarita Holbrook holds a BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), MS in Astronomy from San Diego State University (their first African American graduate in Astronomy), and PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (their first African American graduate in Astronomy & Astrophysics). While active in astrophysics, Holbrook studied stellar death and stellar birth with a focus on the things between the stars: gas, ice and dust. As a postdoc, Holbrook transitioned to the social sciences through a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Center for the Cultural Studies of Science, Technology & Medicine at UCLA and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. You can find out more about their EU funded Marie Curie Project ASTROMOVES at https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/astromoves/2021/07/02/welcome-to-astromoves/.
Holbrook was the IASH-SSPS Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. Holbrook has held over 30 grants from the EU, Japan, South Africa and the USA; totalling more than one million USD. They have published more than 50 peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Holbrook has guest edited for five journals and is on the editorial board of Culture and Cosmos and the International Journal of Astronomy in Culture. Holbrook convened the first conference on African Cultural Astronomy in Africa in Ghana in 2006, followed by a workshop in Egypt in 2009 and another conference more broadly on Cultural Astronomy in South Africa in 2014. Holbrook makes her home in Edinburgh and maintains an affiliation with the Department of Science, Technology & Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
While a fellow at IAU Durham, Holbrook will be working with David Alexander (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy) and Sara Uckelman (Philosophy). Focused on astrophysics conferences, workshops and conference centres; Holbrook will be analysing interviews done with astrophysicists around the formation of collaborations and the opening new research areas. If time permits, Holbrook will make a short film about the project and preliminary results.
TBC
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