Public Engagements

Presentations at academic conferences

  • Public Communication of Science and Technology Biennial Conference, May 2025, Aberdeen: We need to Talk about History. A discussion panel with Dr Felicity Mellor, Professor Bruce Lewenstein and Professor Agustí Nieto Galan.
  • Aarhus University, Centre for Science Studies Seminar Series, Sep 2024: How Was Science Perceived by the British Public in the Eighteenth Century?  
  • London Public Understanding of Science Seminar Series, LSE, May 2024: Public Perceptions of Science in Britain in the Eighteenth Century.
  • University of Edinburgh Q-step Seminar Series, Jan 2020: The Evolution of Statistics in the Work of Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) 
  • University of Glasgow Sociology Seminar Series, Oct 2019: Two Centuries of Sociology and Statistics in Britain.
  • Royal Statistical Society Annual Conference, Sep 2018: What Can We Learn about the Teaching of Statistics from the Historical Relationship between Sociology and Statistics in Britain?
  • British Sociological Association Annual Conference, April 2018: What Impact did the Methodological Debates of the 70s have on British Sociology? The Revelation of the Peel (1968) and Wakeford (1979) Reports.
  • University of Edinburgh Q-step Seminar Series, Jun 2017: Sociology and Statistics in Britain, 1903-1979.
  • British Sociological Association Annual Conference, Apr 2017: British Sociology and Statistics – Historical Divides.
  • University of Edinburgh Annual New Directions Conference, April 2017: British Sociology and Statistics – Historical Divides.
  • University of Edinburgh Q-step Seminar Series, Nov 2015: Statistics and Social Science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and the London Statistical Society, 1830s-1890s.
  • University of Cardiff Q-Step Postgraduate Inaugural Event, Oct 2015: An Historical Overview of the Relationship Between Sociology and Statistics in the UK, 1830s-1980s.
  • University of Edinburgh Annual New Directions Conference, Apr 2015: British Sociology and Statistics: Four Challenges.

Organisation of academic events

History of Sociology Conference

Between April 2017 and April 2018, I organised a two-day conference on the history of British sociology, which was held in Edinburgh on 16th-17th April 2018. The conference covered a variety of historical themes from the Scottish Enlightenment to the present and brought together distinguished scholars from the UK, USA and France in a range of fields, including sociology, history and statistics. The papers presented at the conference were published in Panayotova, P. (ed). 2019. The History of Sociology in Britain: New Research and Revaluation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19929-6

Public outreach

  • On 26 March 2025, I took part in a panel discussion on ‘Public Engagement’ with academics and professional staff from the School of Health in Social Science at The University of Edinburgh. The panel discussion was part of the Impact Skills Day organised by the School.
  • Since, 2022, I have been organising the stream Our Society in the annual Edinburgh Pint of Science festival. The festival invites academics to give public lectures on their research to a non-specialist audience in a local pub. I have presented my research at the festival with talks on Why Does Modern Science Require Popularisation? (2022) and Scientific Values and the Value of Science (2023). In 2024, I gave a lecture on the history of statistical graphics and organised a workshop on data visualisation, Painting by Numbers.
  • In January 2022, I was invited to give a radio talk as part of a series organised by the popular science magazine Bulgarian Science. My talk was entitled Science Communication Through the Centuries and is available on Spotify.