ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Histories of Biogeography Part 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The science of biogeography is rooted in 18th century Europe-centered endeavors to map local flora and fauna over time and across geographic and geologic space, and soon expanded into a global-scale quest to determine how this distribution, and organic difference more generally, had come about, and these investigations were sustained by vast networks of individuals as far-reaching as colonial interests themselves. The history of biogeography is thus unwieldy, with its first 170 or so years scattered across and buried within the work of zoologists, botanists, geologists, and geographers, and even as late the 1970s one of its post prominent practitioners granted that biogeography was a, “strange discipline,” with “no professional biogeographers — no professors … no curators [and] few traditions.” In keeping with the “plural worlds, contested sciences” conference theme, this two-part symposium leans into that complexity. Eight scholars from around come together to discuss different facets of and junctures in the history of biogeography, including evidentiary cultures, Indigenous and European co-production, and sensory norms and climatic narratives in the formation of 19th century biogeographic knowledge; the legacies of settler-colonial biogeography and contemporary repatriation; early 20th century dispersal discourses intertwining the animal and human sciences and the division of historical and ecological biogeography; and late 20th century models invoked to comprehend the bioclimatic value of rainforests and land conservation.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Lisa Onaga, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• The Speaking Ape: Biogeography, Language and the 19th Century Search for the Cradle of Man - Emily Kern, University of Chicago

• Co-Producing Science: Local Knowledge and the Amazonian Expeditions of Bates & Wallace - Anderson Antunes, University of Évora

• “Sense and Suitability: Delimiting ‘Temperate’ in Clime and Place” - Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, University of Vienna

• “Apples versus Oranges: Debating the Effects of the Ice Age in Civil War America” - Caroline Winterer, Stanford University