ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Old Collections, New Stories:  Doing Natural History Humanities in Cambridge and Beyond

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The way we think about natural history collections is changing. Scholars – and especially scientists – have recently begun to reimagine the millions of fossils, plants, and animals housed in gardens, libraries, and museums worldwide as repositories of biodiversity and environmental data. But in this changing conversation, the role of the humanities is unclear. Recent articles discussing the value, role, and future of collections make no reference to their cultural significance or research potential outside of the sciences. In fact, in a 2013 paper, Carnall, Ashby, and Ross highlighted that museums often assume “social and scientific categories can only coexist with one category as dominant and the other as marginalised or totally absent.” Against this backdrop, this panel explores the interaction between the sciences, the humanities, and natural history collections with particular reference to Cambridge’s Natural History Humanities (N2H) programme.

As part of N2H, the three early-career researchers that comprise the panel are each embedded in Cambridge’s natural history collections. Their papers reflect on how diverse historical methods can work alongside the sciences to unlock new stories in centuries-old holdings. Kimberly Glassman follows the theme of disease through the Fitzwilliam Museum’s plant paintings, probing the overlap of art collections with herbaria; Richard Fallon’s paper reverses the science/arts divide by applying literary and bibliographic methods to the Sedgwick Museum’s graptolites, a group of fossils chiefly of interest to specialised palaeontologists; and Grace Exley takes a step back from individual specimens by tracing how a widow’s gift structured collections from the University Library to the Herbarium. Led by a theme, a creature, and a person respectively, these papers explore the multiple lives and meanings of natural history collections, offering a new perspective on their modern-day research potential.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Katherine Arnold, University of Liverpool

Individual Presentations

• Death Becomes Her: An Investigation into the Aesthetics of Plant Disease - Kimberly Glassman, University of Cambridge

• The Life-History of the Pencil: Women and Graptolithology in the Field and the Museum, 1890–1923 - Richard Fallon, University of Cambridge

• Death, Donation, and Demands in the Bunbury Herbarium: Curating Scientific Legacies in Natural History Collections - Grace Exley, University of Cambridge

Session Organizer

• Richard Fallon, University of Cambridge