Announcement – Society for the History of Natural History 2024 awards.

The Council of the Society for the History of Natural History is delighted to announce the following awards which will be celebrated at our forthcoming AGM on 4 July 2024.

SHNH Founders’ Medal

The Society is very pleased to announce that our prestigious Founders’ Medal will this year be awarded to Professor Kristin Johnson, Professor and Director of Science, Technology, Health and Society at the University of Puget Sound, Washington, USA.

Kristin Johnson has contributed enormously to the history of natural history and the naturalist tradition in North America, particularly by exploring the actual practice of naturalists in the field and museum. Her publications include the wonderful book Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which explores the life of the German entomologist Karl Jordan, who spent much of his life working at Walter Rothschild’s museum at Tring in the UK. She has also published widely on a range of natural history topics, including the role of type-specimens in nineteenth century taxonomy, the science and religion debates in America, the making of the journal, The Ibis, and a not-to-be missed article on why natural history was once derided as stamp collecting. Unusually, Kristin also engages with creative non-fiction. Her historical novel The Species Maker, is a fictional exploration of debates over evolution in the 1920s (University of Alabama Press, 2021).

Kristin took her PhD at Oregon State University in 2003. As a professor at the University of Puget Sound, Washington since 2006, she teaches the history of biology and associated subjects such as evolution and ethics. She was involved for many years in the annual meeting of historians of natural history at Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands and will be remembered and admired by decades of attendees. The Founders’ Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History goes to a scholar with wide ranging historical knowledge who loves the field, and its participants, and delights in bringing the subject alive.

Kristin said: ‘Well this was quite a surprise! As someone who teaches at a teaching-intensive, small liberal arts college while trying to maintain a research program, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this honour.’

SHNH Natural History Book Prize (John Thackray Medal)

The Society is very pleased to announce that our prestigious Natural History Book Prize (the John Thackray Medal) will this year be awarded to Nicholas K. Menzies for Ordering the Myriad Things: From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China (University of Washington Press, ISBN: 9780295749457). Nicholas K. Menzies is Research Fellow in Chinese Botanical Science at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fuelled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of “traditional” systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to “modern” ones.

The book explores the fascinating development of modern Chinese botany focusing on the transition from traditional knowledge to modern scientific practice. One judge praised the accessible glossary of places, names, and botanical terms which is in both Chinese and English. The judges felt this was a well-researched scholarly study of an important part of the history of botany and added to our limited knowledge of scientific development in China.

Nicholas said: ‘What an extraordinary surprise! I am deeply honoured … that you have chosen to  select my book from what, I am sure, was a remarkable group of works, to receive this important prize. Thank you’.

For those interested in reading more about Ordering the Myriad Things: From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China you can access a recent review by Jiang Che in the Society’s Journal Archives of Natural History: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/anh.2023.0882

SHNH William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize

The Council of the Society for the History of Natural History is delighted to announce that the winner of the William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize, 2023, is ‘A soft-hearted fool? Eco-cultural networks and Alwin Haagner’s role in private animal trading through South Africa’s National Zoological Garden, 1922-1926, by Mia Uys, who is studying for a PhD at the University of Cape Town. Readers described this as ‘a well-presented and carefully-researched essay which offers new insights into animal trading in colonial South Africa’.

In writing about the award Mia says: “I am honoured and delighted to win the William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize for my paper on Alwin Haagner’s directorship of South Africa’s National Zoo and his role in the wild animal trade during the early 1920s. Animal trade, scientific pursuits and zoological collections in southern Africa are practices that continue to reveal their global historical significance. Thank you for this consideration and for the opportunity to contribute to this field.”

Mia’s paper is scheduled for publication in Archives of Natural History Volume 50 part 2 to be published in October 2024.

SAVE THE DATE

Society for the History of Natural History AGM 2024

4 July 2024 16:30 BST

The AGM is free to attend and open to all SHNH members in good standing, but advance registration is required. Please register via this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/883385659287?aff=oddtdtcreator