Laurence, Alison
Assistant Professor of History
Preferred: alison.laurence@sjsu.edu
Education
- Ph.D., MIT — History and Science, Technology, and Society
- M.A., University of New Orleans — History
- B.A., Brown University — Classics (Latin & Ancient Greek)
Bio
Dr. Alison Laurence is a cultural historian of nature, science, and society in the modern United States with particular interests in extinction, animals, and the politics of display. As an Assistant Professor of History, she teaches courses on public history, historiography, the history of science and technology, and more. She is delighted to work with the student-scholars at SJSU on public historical projects that put history to work in the wider world.
Dr. Laurence's research, supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, and more, examines the lively cultural afterlives of long-gone life. Her current book project — "DINOSTALGIA" — traces how dinosaurs were made into cultural artifacts, consumer goods, and spokes-creatures for consumption. Her writing about dinosaurs, de-extinction, and dioramas (among other topics) has appeared in Animal History, Museum and Society, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Publications
Refereed Articles
“Coyotes, Cougars, Californians: Views on Changing Animal Relations at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,” Animal History 1, no. 3 (August 2025), 38-64.
“Of Dinosaurs and Intergenerational Culture Wars: Dinomania, Nostalgia, and the ‘Missionary Lizards’ of Young Earth Creationism,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 49, no. 3-4 (June 2024), 389-409.
“Pleistocene Park, and Other Designs on Deep Time in the Interwar United States,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 77, no. 1 (Feb. 2023), 169-190.
“Out of Time at the La Brea Tar Pits: People and Other Animals in a Time Capsule of Ice Age Los Angeles," Museum & Society 20, no. 1 (June 2022), 71-88.
“A Discourse with Deep Time: The Extinct Animals of Crystal Palace Park as Heritage Artefacts.” Science Museum Group Journal 11 (Spring 2019).
Public Scholarship & Creative Nonfiction (Selected)
“Cry, Wolf,” Germinate: Environmental History Review, December 17, 2025.
“To Become a Fossil,” The Rumpus, December 5, 2025.
“A Postcard from the Festival of Monsters,” Contingent Magazine, October 22, 2025.
“Nature Red (40) in Tooth and Claw” (a review of Jurassic World: Rebirth), Los Angeles Review of Books, August 16, 2025.
“Troubling Times at the Tar Pits: Mark Dion’s Excavations Amidst Other Historical Mischiefs,” Extinct: The Philosophy of Palaeontology Blog, July 10, 2025.
“Archival Absence and Taxonomic Happenstance,” Thinking with Moss, an NEH-funded project between New York University and the New York Botanical Garden, 2024.
Book Reviews
Review of Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State, by Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams, H-Environment. (October 2024).
Review of Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle, by Lukas Rieppel, H-Environment Roundtable 14, no. 3 (March 13, 2024), 11-14.
Review of Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, by Richard Fallon, Victorian Studies 65, no. 3 (Spring 2024), 540-542.
Review of Merpeople: A Human History, by Vaughn Scribner, History: The Journal of the Historical Association 106, no. 369 (January 2021), 155-157.
Review of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, edited by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew, Journal of the History of Biology 52, no. 2 (June 2019), 361-363.
Courses
HIST 102: Historiography
HIST 197: Introduction to Public History