Lydia V. Pyne

Early life and education

Pyne credits her father, Stephen J. Pyne and her mother, Sonja, with encouraging her to pursue the sciences by being "curious about a lot of things". When she pursued higher education, Pyne was an English major. She earned her master's from the University of Texas, Austin in anthropology and biology at Arizona State.

Career

Pyne's first book was The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene was co-authored with her father, Stephen J. Pyne in 2012. the Pacific Standard and Archaeology.

Pyne's two most recent books were published in 2021 and 2022. Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network was the first of these, published by Reaktion Books. In it, Pyne investigates postcards in order "to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture." Endlings, published in August 2022, is part of the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press. In this book, Pyne talks about how the stories we tell about endlings, or the last known individual of a species, draw from various narrative traditions and what those stories can tell us about grief and loss.

Works with Stephen J. Pyne:

Personal life Pyne lives in Austin, Texas.