Brian Regal, Ph.D.
Areas of Expertise
Brian Regal is an historian of science with a specialty in human evolution and its relationship to religion, politics, culture and American national origin theories. He is interested in ideas and belief systems in the dubious realms of fringe and pseudoscience and questions whether these terms are legitimate. In his research and writing he takes an intellectual historical approach—history of ideas—to these topics. He has written and lectured on the evolution/creation controversy, racial anthropology, and eugenics at conferences in the US, UK and Europe. He has done reviews for Isis and has reviewed human origins proposals for the NSF.
Regal’s first book, Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (2002) was nominated for the 2003 Pfizer Award and won the 2005 Bela Kornitzer Award for best book by a Drew graduate. His Human Evolution: A Guide to the Debates (2005) was profiled in a live Air America Radio interview with host Janeane Garofalo. He wrote the introduction to the Autobiography of Charles Darwin (2004) and the Darwin Compendium (2006). He is the senior editor and contributor to the two volume Icons of Evolution (January, 2008). Among others, he is the author of "Entering Dubious Realms: Grover Krantz, Science and Sasquatch" in the journal Annals of Science, and Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia (2009).
His recent book is an examination of the world of 20th century monster hunting and its place in the history of science published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2011 as Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology.
Professor Regal's latest book, written with Dr. Frank J. Esposito, is The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Hucksters, Quakers, and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster. It is published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2018)
Courses Taught
- History of Science
- History of Medicine
- Human Evolution in Modern Society
- Industrial Revolution
- History of Medicine in America
- History Senior Seminar
- American Civil Society
- History of Alchemy and the Origins of Modern Science
- Charles Darwin: a Life and Times
- History of Pseudoscience in America
- History of Religion in America