ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, II

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This the second in a two-panel symposium. It investigates how transgenerational continuities have been imagined, codified, and contested across time. Bringing together ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern perspectives, we ask how genealogical media—texts, images, diagrams, pedigrees—created specific forms of connectivity between living beings, both human and animal. We proceed from the premise that a wide range of “contents” could be conceived as transmissible through genealogical links: not only blood and biological traits, but also legal titles, religious authority, social privileges, and cultural capital.

By studying genealogy as a practice of mediation, selection, and imagination, the panels highlight its power to structure societies and to order relations between humans, animals, and nature. Genealogical knowledge was never purely descriptive: it asserted claims to legitimacy, codified obligations, and framed possibilities for future generations. In dialogue with contemporary biological understandings of heredity, we seek to situate genealogical thinking within a broader cultural-historical framework—one that crosses disciplines and epochs, and that reveals genealogy as a shared technology of passion, law, and science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Mackenzie Anne Cooley, Hamilton College

Individual Presentations

• Buffon’s Dogs: Breeding, Empire, and the Visualisation of Race - Jens Amborg, University of Uppsala; Petter Hellström, Uppsala University

• Art-Historical Origins of Sexual Selection - Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Institute of Fine Arts

• From “the Genealogical Sublime” to “Dead and Deleted”: Digitization and DNA Databanks - Julia Creet, York University

Session Organizers

• Markus Friedrich, Universität Hamburg

• Mackenzie Anne Cooley, Hamilton College