| Lydia V. Pyne | |
| Occupation: | Writer Historian[1] |
| Language: | English |
| Citizenship: | United States |
| Education: | University of Texas |
| Alma Mater: | Arizona State University |
| Genre: | History Non-fiction |
| Genres: | --> |
| Subject: | Science |
| Subjects: | --> |
| Notablework: | --> |
| Spouses: | --> |
| Partners: | --> |
Lydia V. Pyne is an American historian and science writer. She is a current visiting fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.[2] Pyne and her work have been featured in National Geographic,[3] Inside Higher Education,[4] the Wall Street Journal,[5] and on ABC,[6] Science Friday,[7] WHYY,[8] KERA,[9] Wisconsin Public Radio,[10] and Talk Nerdy.[11]
Pyne credits her father, Stephen J. Pyne and her mother, Sonja,[12] with encouraging her to pursue the sciences by being "curious about a lot of things". When she pursued higher education, Pyne was an English major.[1] She ended up switching to anthropology and history, earning a double major in the subjects, both from Arizona State University.[1] [13] She earned her master's from the University of Texas, Austin in anthropology and biology at Arizona State.[1] [13] For her PhD, she started as an archaeology student and in the end, earned a degree in history and philosophy of science from Arizona State University.[1] [14]
Pyne's first book was The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene was co-authored with her father, Stephen J. Pyne in 2012.[1] That year, she served as a fellow at Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.
Pyne's second book is Bookshelf, a history of the bookshelf, which was published in 2016 by Bloomsbury as part of their "Object Lessons" series.[1] That same year, Viking Press published Pyne's Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils. Seven Skeletons presents the history of "celebrity fossils" including Lucy and La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1.[3]
In 2019, Pyne's book Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff was published by Bloomsbury. The book examines the difference between artificial and "real" things, such as real diamonds versus lab grown diamonds.[7]
Currently, Pyne is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Pyne is also a freelance writer. Her science and history writing has been published in Hyperallergic,[15] the Pacific Standard[16] and Archaeology.[17]
Pyne's two most recent books were published in 2021 and 2022. Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network was the first of these, published by Reaktion Books.[18] In it, Pyne investigates postcards in order "to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture."[19] Endlings, published in August 2022, is part of the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press.[20] In this book, Pyne talks about how the stories we tell about endlings, or the last known individual of a species, draw from various narrative traditions and what those stories can tell us about grief and loss.
Pyne lives in Austin, Texas.[3] She's an active member of the American Alpine Club.[25]