Susan Faye Cannon

Who was Susan Faye Cannon?

Susan Faye Cannon, born Walter Faw Cannon was an American historian of science.

The son of James Cannon III, Dean of Duke University Divinity School, Walter F. Cannon gained a degree in physics at Princeton University. Turning to history of science, his PhD was titled 'On uniformity and progression in early Victorian cosmography'. In the early 1960s he wrote influential articles on uniformitarian geology, the 'Cambridge network', William Whewell's tidology, John Herschel, the relation of Charles Darwin to William Paley, liberal Anglicanism, and the general place of science in nineteenth-century culture. From 1962 to 1979 Cannon, as a historian of science, was Curator of the Classical Physics and Geosciences collection at the Smithsonian Institution. He founded and was the first editor of the Smithsonian Journal of History. In 1976 Cannon changed his name to Susan Faye Cannon, thereafter referring to himself as a 'male woman'.