SHNH Early Career Researcher Symposium 2026
SHNH Early Career Researcher Symposium showcasing research into Natural History. Thursday 19 February 2026 online 09.25-17.45 GMT in partnership with The Linnean Society of London.
The Society for the History of Natural History is a diverse community of people united by an active interest in the study of natural history through time, believing that a greater awareness of how nature has been considered, documented, valued and exploited by societies and individuals worldwide leads to a deeper understanding and celebration of nature.
The Society is known for its friendliness and its meetings combine intellectual excellence with opportunities for an informal exchange of ideas. It is a focal point for the history of all aspects of natural history. This includes art, literature, biography and bibliography as well as investigative historical studies.
We are delighted to announce that in 2026 we are again hosting an Early Career Researcher Symposium and that this year it will be a partnership with The Linnean Society of London. The symposium is dedicated expressly to showcase research into the history of natural history being done by doctoral and early career researchers across the globe. This builds on the Society’s already successful annual William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize, awarded to the best original, unpublished essay in the history of natural history, which is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students worldwide.
The Eventbrite link for registration is: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/early-career-researcher-symposium-2026-tickets-1979391071980
A joining link will be circulated to registered attendees shortly before the event.
For this symposium we have welcomed papers from across the field which speak to any aspects of the history of natural history. The speakers have been drawn from individuals registered for PhD programmes or within 3 years of being awarded their doctorate.
Speakers have been convened into sessions of related 15-20 minute papers with a shared session for questions at the end of each session. Please see the programme below.
Programme Download Programme & Abstracts
9:25am Welcome
9:30am – 11am Session One
Identifying plant species in museum collections: developing new methods of documentation at the The Fitzwilliam Museum
Kimberly Glassman, The Fitzwilliam Museum and University of Cambridge
Evolutionary aesthetics: stylistic divergence in hand-painted zoological wall charts, c.1900
Evelyn Klammer, University of Vienna
Publishing and illustrating natural history in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Lovell Reeve 1840-1920
Sophia Kamps, Royal Holloway, University of London and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Break
11:30am – 1pm Session Two
Echoes of a lost museum: herpetological collections sent by Barbosa du Bocage from the Lisbon Museum to the British Museum (Natural History)
Diogo Parrinha, University of Porto
The Victorian fern album: rehabilitating women’s contributions to nineteenth-century pteridology
Eleanor Gillespie, University of Portsmouth
Natural history exhibitions as conservation capital: game animals of the Empire (1932) and the making of East African game reserves
Charlotte Wood, University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum
Lunch
2:00pm – 3:30pm Session Three
Himalayas pearl forgotten: meteorological monitoring and knowledge dissemination in Yatung customs’ borderlands
Qian Chen, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Needham Research Institute
Curious Gentlemen & A Virtuous Tree: naturalists and sassafras in the Colonial Chesapeake
Sierra S. Roark, University of North Carolina
Chinese species in the Jardin d’Acclimatation: Dabry de Thiersant’s natural history network and local faunal knowledges, 1862-1868
Clement Qiang Huang, York University
Break
4:00pm – 5:30pm Session Four
Butterfly bodies: insect preservation and the limits of commodification in Early Modern Natural History
Stephanie Reitzig, Columbia University
Local knowledge, local remedies: healing earths in Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire
Sandra Liwanowska, University of Cambridge
Putting Archaeopteryx in its place: avian fossils as spaces of knowledge in the Evolutionary Sciences
David E. Lawrence, University of New Mexico
5:30-5:45 – Closing Remarks
For more information on the Society please see www.shnh.org.uk.
Archives of Natural History is the journal of the Society for the History of Natural History, publishing papers on the history and bibliography of all branches of natural history.
For more information see https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/anh.
Registered Charity no. 2103555 in England and Wales