ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Histories of Biogeography Part 2

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

• Janet Browne, Harvard

Individual Presentations

• “Bringing Our Ancestors Home: Reclaiming Indigenous Bodies from the Legacies of Settler-Colonial Biogeography” - Kirsten Greer, Departments of Geography and History, Nipissing University

• “Centres of Dispersal & Mobile Biogeographies in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” - Chris Manias, King's College London

• “The roles of Biological Systematics and Plate Tectonics in 20th century Historical Biogeography” - Malte Ebach, UNSW, Australian Museum

• "An Air Conditioner or a Sink?: The Bioclimatic Value of Rainforests, 1970 to 2000" - Oliver Lucier, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, University of Vienna