2008-2009 Academic Year

Professor Andre Wakefield has Book Reviewed in Nature

The first English edition of G. W. Leibniz's Protogaea, edited and translated by Associate Professor of History Andre Wakefield and Claudine Cohen, recently received a prominent review in the British journal Nature. Wakefield and Cohen, a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, met in 1999 at M.I.T., where they discovered a common interest in Leibniz's theory of the earth. In 2001 they received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce an English edition of the work.

As Richard Fortey writes in Nature, Leibniz's Protogaea "has now been translated from its original Latin into English for the first time, and bears a title that chimes with our current concerns about global ecosystems." The book should appeal to scholars working in many fields, from geologists and geographers to historians and philosophers.

To read the review, click here.