
Space
Why Yuri Gagarin wasn’t the first in space – and who beat him to it
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Vladimir Brljak works at the intersection of literary history, intellectual history, and the history of science. His main current project is When Did Space Turn Dark?, a monograph exploring the shift from a bright to a dark universe in the Western cosmological tradition, to be published by Reaktion Books. He is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and a current (2025–26) British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. He has held the Thole Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as well as visiting fellowships at the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book, the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Warburg Institute.
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