Teach for the Stars

The universe is expanding, and so is our knowledge of it. Fortunately, Karen Masters, a professor of astronomy and physics, has cataloged all the essentials of the past 800 or so years in her latest book, The Astronomers’ Library: The Books that Unlocked the Mysteries of the Universe (Liber Historica), which came out this spring. 

Masters kicks off the collection with a description of teaching class in the library of the College’s Strawbridge Observatory, a fitting depiction of the intersection of two of her passions: astronomy and books.

“I was the kind of kid that loved going to the library,” she says. “I always would get out this huge stack of books.” Despite her love of reading, Masters was always drawn to the sciences more. She recalls winning a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—which, naturally, is included in her collection—as a prize for excelling at physics in school. She didn’t begin to think of herself as a writer until grad school at Cornell University, when she was a teaching assistant in the astronomy department and got involved with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.

Masters has taught in Haverford’s writing program as well, in addition to her regular classes in physics and astronomy. “For me, getting to write a book about astronomy was pretty awesome,” she says. “My aim was to write it in a way that’s accessible and people understand.” The collection offers, in chronological order, concise summaries of the top astronomy titles from the past 800 years, including some early modern books Haverford has in its special collections.

While Masters wanted to be thorough, she also wanted to avoid focusing too much on what she calls “the usual suspects”: books written by white male Europeans, which admittedly, are  “incredibly important to the arc of astronomy and understanding,” she says. Readers can find a section on Indian astronomy, which has a lot of connections to astrology, and plenty of works by women. “I was really struck by how many textbooks, particularly in the 19th century, were written by women for women, when I had sort of grown up with this idea of astronomy and physics as a very male subject,” Masters says.

Clearly, that is changing. Masters has seen an influx of women and men in her classes, so much so that teaching in the library, with its stacks of books and round communal table, may not be possible much longer.

“I love teaching in that space. It’s a really delightful space,” she says. “But a lot of our classes these days are too big to fit in there. We just had this huge explosion in the number of [astronomy] majors.”

Clearly, the universe isn’t the only thing that keeps expanding.

—Jill Waldbieser