About the speaker

Robert Goulding is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

An internationally recognized historian of science, mathematics, and philosophy, Professor Goulding explores the intellectual traditions that shaped Western thought from antiquity through the Renaissance. His research examines the intersections of natural philosophy, mathematics, optics, vision, Neoplatonism, and the history of scientific inquiry, with a particular interest in how philosophical ideas informed our understanding of the natural world.

Professor Goulding earned degrees in Classics and Mathematics from the University of Canterbury before completing his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Warburg Institute in London. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, he joined the University of Notre Dame in 2003.

His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study. 

He is the author of Defending Hypatia and has published extensively on the history of mathematics, optics, and Renaissance intellectual culture. He is currently completing a new translation and commentary on the philosophical treatises of Plotinus, alongside a major study of the discovery of the law of refraction in the early modern period.