The Outside Reader was founded in 2009 by Audra J. Wolfe, Ph.D. Audra started her career in publishing in 2001 while finishing her doctoral program in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. After a short stint as an editorial assistant at the University of Pennsylvania Press, she moved to Rutgers University Press, where she served as the acquiring editor for the sciences from 2002 to 2006. From 2006 to 2009, she was the editor-in-chief at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute), where she oversaw the publication of Chemical Heritage magazine and established a book series (Synthesis) with the University of Chicago Press.
While Audra considers herself a publishing professional, she continues to produce scholarly and popular works in the history of science. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, and the popular history podcast American History Tellers. She is the author of Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018) and Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013). You can find our more about Audra’s work as a historian on her personal website.