John Steele

John Michael Steele is a British historian of science. He is Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity and Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University. He specializes in the history of ancient astronomy, with a particular focus on its development in Babylonia.

Following his PhD, Steele was a postdoc at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1999, he returned to Durham as a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow, before joining the University of Toronto in 2002 as E. P. May Fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He remained there until 2004, then rejoined Durham as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He moved to Brown University in 2008. From 2021 to 2025 Steele served as President of the Commission for the History of Ancient and Medieval Astronomy (CHAMA).