ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Geopolitically Networked Heritage of Irish Astronomy at Boyden Observatory, South Africa, 1950-1978

• In Event: Histories of 19th and 20th Century Astronomy

English Abstract

In 2025, the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard Telescope (ADH) of Boyden Observatory, Bloemfontein, South Africa, boasted 75 years since its installation. This globally collaborative telescope supported the reinvigoration of Irish astronomical science in the post-WWII period, situating Armagh and Dunsink Observatories into a prestigious global network through their international partners such as Harvard University in the Boyden Council, which maintained the observatory from 1955 until its 1976 closure. Commonly understood to be the “first international telescope” (UNESCO, n.d.), the ADH has never been critically contextualised into its nexus of situated geopolitical scripts and power-relations which perpetually impacted upon its conception, negotiations, installation and its subsequent demise, amid the backdrop of Apartheid South Africa and international boycott.

Consequently, this research aims to build upon Swanner’s (2017) theorisations which posit that socially-inflected astronomical science has the capacity to influence and perpetuate global geopolitical events and colonial epistemic power-relations, just as they are impacted by them. The ADH can then be observed to have impacted relations, implicating 20th century Irish astronomy into an unconscious perpetuation of Cold-War geopolitical logics and the racist power-knowledge hierarchies of Apartheid, through its situatedness within and association to the Apartheid regime through the subordination of Bloemfontein’s residents. Through the critical analysis of the geopolitical discourses employed within archived correspondences between the internationally networked Boyden Council and astronomers in Ireland, this study seeks to expand on broader attempts to decolonize the history of astronomy by spatially and temporally situating institutions within the geopolitical contexts and impacts of their astronomy. Broadly, this study seeks to re-centre the historical study of astronomical institutions through a critical lens.

Author

• Erin Rose Manson, Queen's University, Belfast