Exhibiting Evolution

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel discusses natural history museums and exhibitions in Russia/the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe between the 1860s and the 1950s. We are interested in how exhibiting practices not only popularize scientific theories of evolution, but also in how they participate in evolutionary knowledge production between science, politics, and artistic practice. This entails museums and their practices of acquiring, collecting, ordering and presenting their objects, as well as temporary exhibitions and their ways of popularizing evolutionary knowledge in non-permanent spaces through innovative devices of visualization. The panel is interested in explorations of the political frameworks that shaped the way the Darwinian worldview was exhibited. It also sheds light on the pivotal role of international networks of cooperation in the making of evolutionary exhibition culture in Eastern Europe. Another field of interest is the representation of zoological exhibitions in literature. The panel thus addresses the convention’s theme of memory through the lens of culture’s ways of remembering natural history.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Mirjam Voerkelius, U of Maryland, Baltimore County

Papers

• Dostoevskii Versus Pisarev: 'Struggle for Existence' Inside a Crocodile - Emily Ziffer, Yale U

• Evolution for the Masses: Exhibiting Evolution at the Moscow Darwin Museum - Mirjam Voerkelius, U of Maryland, Baltimore County

• Engels on the Beach: Popular Science Travel Exhibitions in 1950s Czechoslovakia and East Germany - Philipp Kohl, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)

Discussant

• Joseph Bradley, U of Tulsa