SHNH – Society for the History of Natural History announces new award at its AGM – The Patron’s Review in association with the Society’s patron Sir David Attenborough OM CH FRS

The President of SHNH – Society for the History of Naural History, Professor Geoff Moore, is delighted to announce a new award, The Patron’s Review. A Council initiative and in association with the Society’s patron Sir David Attenborough OM CH FRS, an outstanding young scholar, nominated by Council, is invited by the Society’s Patron to write a review that advances the Society’s objects, namely “the historical and bibliographical study of the growth of all branches of natural history in all periods and cultures”.

The inaugural Patron’s Review entitled “The role of images in the development of Renaissance natural history” by Dr Sachiko Kusakawa of Trinity College, Cambridge has been accepted for publication in the next issue of Archives of natural history.

Dr Sachiko Kusakawa is interested in the observational, descriptive and pictorial practices in the development and production of scientific knowledge in the early modern period (1500-1720). She is co-investigator to an AHRC-funded research project on ‘Diagrams, figures and the transformation of astronomy 1450-1650’ www.hps.cam.ac.uk/diagrams/. She has completed a monograph on illustrations in botanical and anatomical works in the sixteenth century (Picturing the book of nature, Chicago University Press, 2011) and is now working on the drawings of the early Royal Society (particularly by Richard Waller) and the function of images in the Philosophical Transactions. Dr Kusakawa lectures on the history of science in the early modern period and occasionally lectures in the Dept of the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.

Selected Publications include:

• Image, text and “observatio”: the Codex Kentmanus. Early Science and Medicine 14-4 (2009):445-475.
• The uses of pictures in the formation of learned knowledge: the cases of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius’, in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, edited by S. Kusukawa and I. Maclean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 73-96.
• The Historia Piscium (1686)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 54 (2000):179-197. [http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/54/2/179.abstract]
• The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: the case of Philip Melanchthon, Ideas in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

For more information or photos please contact Elaine Shaughnessy, Newsletter Editor, SHNH-Society for the History of Natural History www.shnh.org.uk. at webmaster@shnh.org.uk

Notes for Editors:

SHNH – The Society for the History of Natural History (www.shnh.org.uk) is a friendly international society for everyone who is interested in natural history in the broadest sense. This includes botany, zoology and geology as well as natural history collections, exploration, art and bibliography. Everyone with an interest in these subjects – professional or amateur – is welcome to join.

The Society has a thriving international membership and international meetings are held at regular intervals. The Society’s main publication is Archives of natural history and all volumes published since 1936 are now available online. Containing refereed, illustrated papers and book reviews, Archives is published for the Society by Edinburgh University Press. A more informal Newsletter is published three or four times a year. From time to time, the Society also publishes other works of interest. The most recent publication is Darwin in the Archives.