SHNH e-newsletter (4) January 2024
Dear Friends
Welcome to our SHNH e-news and an especially warm welcome to all our new members.
Gina Douglas has issued an awards announcement and Elle Larsson has news of our events programme this year and how to book. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible online and also in person.
A message from Gina Douglas, President, Society for the History of Natural History
Dear Members,
We are pleased to announce that nominations for two of the Society’s most prestigious awards – the Founders’ Medal and the President’s Award – are open for your nominations.
Please do forward your recommendations for these awards to Will Beharrell, SHNH Secretary at: secretary@shnh.org.uk by 1 March 2024.
We are also delighted to announce the short list for the SHNH Natural History Book Prize (Thackray Medal).
Elle Larsson also gives a news update on meetings and you will find details of:
- Registration for the Early Career Researcher Symposium, 22 February 2024, which is now OPEN!
- The upcoming joint seminar with the Animal History Group by SHNH member Professor Victoria Dickenson, 17 April 2024
- The upcoming visit to the University Herbarium at Winterbourne House and Gardens, Birmingham, 19 April 2024
- The Annual General Meeting
- Release of the Call for Papers for the Summer Meeting 2024.
SHNH AWARDS 2024
Now inviting nominations
Deadlines 1st March 2024
The Founders’ Medal is awarded to persons who have made a substantial contribution to the study of the history or bibliography of natural history (read more). Nominees should demonstrate either a sustained record of high-quality publications or other outputs in the field of the history of natural history, and or a sustained contribution to dissemination of the history of natural history through practice or curation. Nominations may only be made by SHNH members, and closes on 1 March 2024.
Last year’s recipient was Professor Geoff Moore, Emeritus Professor of Marine Biology at the University of London and awarded in recognition of his great service to science by the wealth of scholarship in his numerous publications on a range of diverse topics including ecology, taxonomy, pollution and conservation spanning a period of over 50 years.
Previous winners are listed here.
The President’s Award recognises an individual or team’s contribution and impact in promoting and improving accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity to the study of the history of natural history (read more). The winner receives the President’s Medal, to be presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Society. Nominations can be made by both members and non-members, and close on 1 March 2024.
Victoria Dickenson was the 2023 winner of the President’s Award for her work on The Gwillim Project: Women, Environment, and Networks of Knowledge and Exchange in Early Nineteenth Century Madras.
Previous winners are listed here.
Further information about the two awards, including full selection criteria, can be found on the SHNH website.
Please submit your nominations to Will Beharrell, SHNH Secretary at: secretary@shnh.org.uk by 1 March 2024.
SHNH Natural History Book Award
Short list
We are delighted to announce the shortlist nominations for the SHNH Natural History Book Prize (John Thackray Medal), awarded for the best book published on the history or bibliography of natural history in the preceding two years.
We send our warmest congratulations to the authors and their publishers: Christine Jackson (John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd), Mackenzie Cooley (University of Chicago Press) Edith Widder (Virago) and Nicholas K. Menzies (University of Washington Press).
Christine E. Jackson, A Newsworthy Naturalist: The Life of William Yarrell
John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd. 2021
William Yarrell (1784–1856), was an influential naturalist at a time when natural history was becoming an important factor in 19th century society. He wrote two important books: A History of British Fishes and A History of British Birds, still being quoted as the authorities well into the next century and admired today, especially for their delightful wood engravings. He was a member and sometime Treasurer, Secretary and Vice-President of the Zoological, Linnean and Entomological Societies. He was known to, and greatly admired by, the leading naturalists; Charles Darwin sought Yarrell’s advice on several occasions.
In addition to his key role as an organiser and disseminator of knowledge about the British fish and bird fauna, Yarrell also conducted significant original scientific research, being perhaps best known as the first person to recognise Bewick’s Swan as a separate species from the Whooper Swan, naming it Cygnus bewickii after his illustrious ornithological predecessor.
Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.
Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.
Edith Widder, Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea
Virago, 2021
Edith Widder’s childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light—as well as the importance of optimism. As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth’s last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.
Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet’s oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.
Nicholas K. Menzies, Ordering the Myriad Things: From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China
University of Washington Press, 2021
China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties.
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 fueled a new knowledge of China itself. The importance of botanical illustration is highlighted 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.
Early Career Researcher Symposium
Registration is now open!
Online, 22 February 2024
Please join us on the 22 February 2024 for our Early Career Researcher Symposium, showcasing research into the history of natural history being done by doctoral and early career researchers across the globe.
The event will be an online Zoom event taking place from 09.15–17.45 GMT. We hope that the timing will enable participation across, at least some worldwide time zones. The meeting is free and we do hope you will join us.
The full programme can be found on the website: https://shnh.org.uk/all-events/shnh-early-career-researcher-symposium-22-february-2024/
To register, please sign up via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/early-career-researcher-symposium-2024-tickets-791991827877
A joining link will be circulated to registered attendees shortly before the event.
Visit to the University Herbarium at Winterbourne House and Garden
Friday 19 April 2024. From 11am. Cost £8.
Restored to its Edwardian Arts and Craft splendour, Winterbourne House is a unique heritage attraction – set within seven acres of beautiful botanic gardens. Only minutes from Birmingham city centre, Winterbourne is a hidden gem – home to beautiful antiques and over 6,000 plant species from around the world. Wander along the woodland walk, stroll through the hazelnut tunnel, cross the 1930’s Japanese Bridge or simply soak up the tranquillity of this perfectly English Edwardian home.
On this visit we will be given a brief tour of the University Herbarium which is housed at Winterbourne House and Garden. The tour will be followed by a chance to look at sample boxes of specimens and archive material and a talk from curator Henrietta Lockhart on the history of the herbarium and how it came to be.
The tour and talk will last approximately 90 minutes after which time delegates are able to explore the house and gardens, admission to which is all included in the fee. The tea room will also be open for drinks and light refreshment, but we are asked to stagger our visits as it’s only small.
This tour has been rescheduled following last years AGM and we do hope you’ll be able to join us for this spring visit!
Please sign up via Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/visit-to-the-university-herbarium-at-winterbourne-house-and-garden-tickets-792000644247
Painting Animals in 18th-century Saint-Domingue, Professor Victoria Dickenson, McGill Library and Collections.
A joint seminar with the Animal History Group
7pm UK Time, 17 April 2024, Online via Zoom
Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was the richest colony in the French Empire in the 18th century. Columbus visited the island of Hispaniola in 1492 and described great flocks of parrots darkening the skies. By the time the French engineer René Gabriel de Rabié (1717-85) arrived in 1742, the environment had been impacted by the intensive agriculture of sugarcane, coffee, indigo and cocoa plantations worked by enslaved peoples.
In the 1760s, de Rabié began to paint the plants and animals he encountered around his home in Cap Français and on his travels around the coast. By the time he left the island to return to France in 1784, he had amassed hundreds of watercolour drawings, as well as notes on habitats, habits and local names. He was assisted in this enterprise of natural history documentation by his daughter Jacquette Anne Marie Rabié de la Boissière and by the many enslaved people who worked as gardeners, cooks, household servants, fishers, paddlers and divers.
De Rabié was not the only European to document the novel (to him) flora and fauna he encountered in Saint Domingue. In addition to published records, there are numerous manuscript journals and drawings by engineers, members of the French military, doctors and plantation owners. These works reveal not only a European framework for the natural world, but also provide insight into the ways enslaved African and Indigenous peoples viewed this environment.
The four albums of de Rabié’s paintings are now preserved in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection of McGill University Library in Montreal. Through close reading of original images, manuscript notes and published records, and through discussions with contemporary Haitian experts and residents, our research group is attempting to understand better how animals and people interacted on Saint Domingue in the 18th century, and how we can ensure a more inclusive documentation of historical records.
This research is part of the three-year research project Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural History Collections, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-april-17th-tickets-707754983207
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link shortly before the event.
Annual General Meeting 2024
The year the AGM will be held online and separate from the Summer Meeting to ensure as many members as possible can attend. A date and further details will be circulated in due course.
Summer Meeting Call for Papers – Coming Soon!
Our final notice concerns the Summer Meeting for which a call for papers will be circulated next week.
Kindest Regards,
Gina Douglas Hon. FLS
President, Society for the History of Natural History
Email: president@shnh.org.uk