James T. Costa

Dr. Jim Costa is Executive Director Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University's of the Highlands Biological Station in Highlands, North Carolina, where he teaches he has taught courses in biogeography, Darwin's Origin of Species, and a comparative temperate-tropical ecology summer course split between the southern Appalachian mountains and the Andes of Ecuador. An entomologist with a special interest in social evolution, Jim has been a Research Associate in Entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology since 1996, and the author of numerous scientific research papers, reviews, and the book "The Other Insect Societies" (Harvard, 2006). Jim's historical research and writing have focused on Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and the history of evolutionary biology. His books include "The Annotated Origin" (2009), "On the Organic Law of Change" (2013), "Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species" (2014), "Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory" (2017), and most recently the new Wallace biography "Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace" (2023) and a new celebration of the art and science of Charles Darwin's ingenious botanical studies: "Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants" (2023). Jim has held fellowships at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, the New York Botanical Garden's LuEsther Mertz Library, and the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Hamburg. He lectures widely in the US and Europe, is a regular travel program leader/lecturer for the Harvard Alumni Association, and for many years co-instructed Harvard’s Darwin summer program at the University of Oxford, England. His honors and awards include the Wallace Medal of the London-based Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund (2017), and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize of the Society for the Study of Evolution (2023). For more information, visit Jim's website at www.jamestcosta.com.