Jonathan Topham is Professor of History of Science at the University of Leeds, UK, and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. His research relates mainly to the history of science and religion, and of printed communication in science, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.

His recent monograph, “Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age” (Chicago University Press, 2022), advocates for an approach to the history of science and religion that decentres questions of knowledge and belief, showing them to be only one aspect of a history that extends far beyond, into the complex realities of everyday religious and scientific life. The book was awarded the 2023 academic book prize of the International Society for Science and Religion and was shortlisted for the 2023 Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society.

Topham is currently working on a project, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant, re-examining the epoch-making programme of cheap publishing of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826–46). The Project explores how the underlying vision of authoritative, useful, and secular knowledge transformed British society.