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Wilhelmina Roos

Independent researcher & writer

About

A cluttered oak desk under a window — an open notebook, a fountain pen, and stacks of index cards

I am an independent researcher and writer working at the seam where the history of science meets the history of reading. For the better part of a decade I have followed marginalia, discarded drafts, and the quiet apparatus of footnotes to ask how knowledge is actually assembled — not in the tidy account a finished book gives, but in the false starts and revisions that come before it. I write essays, commissioned reports, and the occasional long piece, and I keep a slow correspondence with the archivists who patiently put up with my questions.

  • The history of reading and annotation
  • The material culture of the archive
  • Footnotes, indexes, and other reading machines
  • Amateur naturalists and their notebooks
  • How rough drafts become finished arguments

Work

Most of my work arrives as a commission — a museum wants an essay to sit beside an exhibition, a journal wants a longer piece, a press wants a reader’s report. I take on only a small number each year, so that each one can be read slowly and argued through properly.

  • The Annotated Century — a long essay on marginalia, 2025
  • Reader’s reports for two university presses
  • Loose Leaves — a column on archives and reading
  • An exhibition essay for the Provincial Museum
  • Field notes toward a book on amateur naturalists
A wall of well-worn reference books and boxed archive folders lit by warm lamplight

When a project needs images as much as words I collaborate with photographers and conservators, and over the years I have learned to write captions that carry their own weight rather than merely pointing at the picture beside them.

Notes

Between commissions I keep a working notebook in public — short notes on whatever I happen to be reading, provisional and often wrong, offered less as conclusions than as an invitation to argue with me about them.

A fanned deck of handwritten index cards beside a magnifying glass on a linen cloth
  • A fountain pen and far too many index cards
  • Zotero, kept tidy against my nature
  • A flatbed scanner for the fragile pages
  • Plain text, version-controlled, no distractions
  • Interlibrary loan, requested patiently

None of these matter half as much as time. The single luxury this work truly requires is the freedom to sit with a difficult source until it gives something up, to read the same paragraph a dozen times over, and to resist the pressure to publish before an argument has actually earned its confidence.

Elsewhere

I am easiest to reach by email, and I post occasional notes and reading lists in the places below. I answer slowly, but I do answer.