ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How to Read What Isn’t There: Teaching Loss with Natural History Collections

• In Event: “Pedagogies of Things” in the Natural History Humanities

English Abstract

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, natural history was a project of accumulation. The sheer dimension of biological material that was collected, preserved, transported, and eventually displayed or stored was unprecedented, often violently divorced from its original context to serve imperialist aims. However, we know that a far higher percentage of that material and its associated data was lost, destroyed, eroded, or adapted to fit into the prescriptive norms of European science. Scholars of natural history working with collections have engaged with the very fragmentary evidence available on labels, accession records, correspondence, scientific journals, and with the specimens themselves to try to piece together an understanding of how those collections came to be and their cultural, social, political, institutional, and environmental implications. But how do we teach students to think productively about what isn’t there? This presentation will take the problem of loss as its focus, using examples from my own teaching practice with both first-year undergraduate students and master’s students at the University of Liverpool. Thinking in this way encourages students to consider larger-scale problems we encounter in environmental history - knowledges erased, materialities warped, ecosystems destroyed - but also how our engagement with scientific ‘objects’ allows us to ask new historical questions.

Author

• Katherine Arnold, University of Liverpool