The First Word

Christine Kenneally was born in Melbourne, Australia. She is a journalist who writes on science, language and culture. She received an Honors BA in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University and completed a PhD in Linguistics at Cambridge University in England. After living in Iowa City for three-and-a-half years, she moved to New York City where she started writing for Feed, the Internet's first magazine, founded by Stephanie Syman and Steven Johnson, among other publications.

Her science articles include one about new field of epigenetics, the study of the forces that act on and effect alterations to DNA Her first book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is about the relatively new field of evolutionary linguistics starring such figures as cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and psychologists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom. Kenneally's second book, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures, draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be headed. She was shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2015 for this title. Her title The Past May Not Make You Feel Better, won the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2015.

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