Meredith F. Small

Meredith F. Small is Professor Emerita at Cornell University, where she taught biological anthropology for over three decades. She received the Russel Teaching Award and was named a Weiss Presidential Fellow for Excellence in Teaching at Cornell. Dr. Small is also an experienced science journalist writing for various magazines and newspapers such as Discover, Natural History, and The New York Times. She was awarded the Anthropology in Media prize by the American Anthropological Association, and her work has been chosen twice for The Best Science and Nature Writing series published annually by Houghton Mifflin. Small is also internationally known for her book Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent and other books that address the interaction of biology and culture. In the last few years, she has written two books on Venice while learning to speak Italian. Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Culture and Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World.