Lydia V. Pyne

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.^[3] Pyne and her work have been featured in National Geographic,^[4] Inside Higher Education,^[5] the Wall Street Journal,^[6] and on ABC,^[7] Science Friday,^[8] WHYY,^[9] KERA,^[10] Wisconsin Public Radio,^[11] and Talk Nerdy.^[12]

Lydia V. Pyne
Pyne at the Flaming Cliffs in 2017.
Occupation	Writer Historian[1]
Language	English
Citizenship	United States
Education	University of Texas[1]
Alma mater	Arizona State University[2]
Genre	History Non-fiction
Subject	Science
Website
www.pynecone.org

Early life and education

Pyne credits her father, Stephen J. Pyne and her mother, Sonja,^[13] 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][14] She earned her master's from the University of Texas, Austin in anthropology and biology at Arizona State.^[1][14] 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][2]

Career

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.^[12]

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.^[4]

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.^[8]

Currently, Pyne is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.^[3] 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.

Works

• with Stephen J. Pyne: The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene. Viking. 2012.^[21] Pyne, Lydia; Pyne, Stephen J. (2013). pbk edition. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-312342-2.
• Bookshelf. Object Lessons (a book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things). Bloomsbury. 2016.^[22] Pyne, Lydia (2016). pbk edition. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 978-1-5013-0732-4.
• Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils. Viking. 2016. ISBN 978-0-525-42985-2.^[23]
• Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff. Bloomsbury. 8 August 2019. ISBN 978-1-4729-6182-2.^[24]
• Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network. Reaktion Books. 13 October 2021. ISBN 978-1789144857.
• Endlings: Fables for the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. 16 August 2022. ISBN 978-1-5179-1483-7.

Personal life

Pyne lives in Austin, Texas.^[4] She's an active member of the American Alpine Club.^[25]