Joan Steigerwald
Professor
Office: 215 Vanier College
Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext: 70417
Email: steiger@yorku.ca
I am a Professor in the Department of Humanities, and in the Graduate Programs of Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and Social and Political Thought, at York University. My research interests explore the intersections of the history of the life sciences and environmental history, German idealism and romanticism, and science and technology studies.
My recent book Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800 examines attempts to develop a science of biology. It explores how the endeavor to delimit experimentally the organic from the inorganic blurred the boundaries of life, and how instrumental investigations of organic vitality acted as media shaping the understandings of life. These epistemic concerns were also central to the philosophies of nature developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, from those of Kant to Schelling. Reading German philosophies of nature against the grain of many idealist expositions, I argue that the material and contingent conditions of life opened critical judgments of organic phenomena to dialectical irresolution and boundary concepts. Romantic figures, such as Goethe and Novalis, also took up these experimental and epistemic concerns in their own practical investigations and figurative representations of natural phenomena. The book is concerned with how life became a problem in the years around 1800, and argues for reconsidering the significance of the ways that problem was explored at the time for our subsequent understandings of life.
My new book project, A Romantic Natural History, foregrounds the material entities that have appeared in my past work on this period and makes them, instead of human subjects and social institutions, the main characters of its historical narrative. It asks: How are we to comprehend the complex dynamics between material entities and cultural transformation? It is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2022-2027). In its attention to material entities, the proposed research project addresses tensions in modern scholarship in the humanities and social sciences between recent concerns with the material and the non-human world, on one side, and long-standing concerns with historical and cultural framings of human understandings of the natural world, on the other. The project focuses on material entities newly encountered through natural historical inquiry in the Romantic period that cannot be simply individuated as objects and that cannot be understood as distinctly natural, artificial, or cultural. At the time, such material entities were regarded as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things, as at once unsettling and exciting, and as thus opening broad historical, cultural, and epistemic questions. The research project explores how the hybridity of the material entities it studies and the tensions between the different approaches to their understanding were generative of transformations of the history of nature and its cultural significance.
Degrees
PhD, King’s College LondonMA, University of Manitoba
BA, University of Manitoba
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
My SSHRC Insight Grant, A Romantic Natural History, explores the relationships between material entities and cultural transformation. The Romantic period was a time of tremendous changes in both the natural and human sciences that shaped many of our views of the modern world. In its attention to material entities, the proposed research project addresses tensions in modern scholarship in the humanities and social sciences between recent concerns with the material and the non-human world, on one side, and long-standing concerns with historical, social, and cultural framings of human understandings of the world, on the other. It questions oppositions between material objects and subjective perspectives, the nonhuman and the human. The project focuses on material entities newly encountered through natural historical inquiry in the Romantic period that cannot be simply individuated as objects and that cannot be understood as distinctly natural, artificial, or cultural. Examples include: the infusoria found in experiments and speculations on the origins and elements of life; sensitive plants crossing the plant-animal divide; living instruments such as frog legs and human sensory organs; racialized “Caucasians” and their others; hieroglyphs as natural languages. At the time, such hybrid material entities were regarded as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things, as at once unsettling and exciting, and as thus opening broad historical, cultural, and epistemic questions. Case studies will act as sites for fostering interdisciplinary research, examining the interplay of the study of material entities, cultural values, scientific inquiry, philosophical problems, and literary genres. Case studies of material entities provide a means to stage encounters between the different modes of inquiry, the different perspectives, the different kinds of texts and creative works seeking to comprehend them, reading each through and against its others.
SSHRC
Special Issue of Kabiri 4, 2024.
Approach to Teaching
My teaching reflects the different areas of my research. I teach the graduate courses Essays on the Philosophy of Freedom and Organisms as Instruments. At the undergraduate level I teach the courses Nature in Narrative, Visual Cultures and Natural Worlds and the first year general education course Science and the Humanities.
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Winter 2025 | AP/HUMA4228 3.0 | M | Nature in Narrative | SEMR |
I am a Professor in the Department of Humanities, and in the Graduate Programs of Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and Social and Political Thought, at York University. My research interests explore the intersections of the history of the life sciences and environmental history, German idealism and romanticism, and science and technology studies.
My recent book Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800 examines attempts to develop a science of biology. It explores how the endeavor to delimit experimentally the organic from the inorganic blurred the boundaries of life, and how instrumental investigations of organic vitality acted as media shaping the understandings of life. These epistemic concerns were also central to the philosophies of nature developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, from those of Kant to Schelling. Reading German philosophies of nature against the grain of many idealist expositions, I argue that the material and contingent conditions of life opened critical judgments of organic phenomena to dialectical irresolution and boundary concepts. Romantic figures, such as Goethe and Novalis, also took up these experimental and epistemic concerns in their own practical investigations and figurative representations of natural phenomena. The book is concerned with how life became a problem in the years around 1800, and argues for reconsidering the significance of the ways that problem was explored at the time for our subsequent understandings of life.
My new book project, A Romantic Natural History, foregrounds the material entities that have appeared in my past work on this period and makes them, instead of human subjects and social institutions, the main characters of its historical narrative. It asks: How are we to comprehend the complex dynamics between material entities and cultural transformation? It is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2022-2027). In its attention to material entities, the proposed research project addresses tensions in modern scholarship in the humanities and social sciences between recent concerns with the material and the non-human world, on one side, and long-standing concerns with historical and cultural framings of human understandings of the natural world, on the other. The project focuses on material entities newly encountered through natural historical inquiry in the Romantic period that cannot be simply individuated as objects and that cannot be understood as distinctly natural, artificial, or cultural. At the time, such material entities were regarded as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things, as at once unsettling and exciting, and as thus opening broad historical, cultural, and epistemic questions. The research project explores how the hybridity of the material entities it studies and the tensions between the different approaches to their understanding were generative of transformations of the history of nature and its cultural significance.
Degrees
PhD, King’s College LondonMA, University of Manitoba
BA, University of Manitoba
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
My SSHRC Insight Grant, A Romantic Natural History, explores the relationships between material entities and cultural transformation. The Romantic period was a time of tremendous changes in both the natural and human sciences that shaped many of our views of the modern world. In its attention to material entities, the proposed research project addresses tensions in modern scholarship in the humanities and social sciences between recent concerns with the material and the non-human world, on one side, and long-standing concerns with historical, social, and cultural framings of human understandings of the world, on the other. It questions oppositions between material objects and subjective perspectives, the nonhuman and the human. The project focuses on material entities newly encountered through natural historical inquiry in the Romantic period that cannot be simply individuated as objects and that cannot be understood as distinctly natural, artificial, or cultural. Examples include: the infusoria found in experiments and speculations on the origins and elements of life; sensitive plants crossing the plant-animal divide; living instruments such as frog legs and human sensory organs; racialized “Caucasians” and their others; hieroglyphs as natural languages. At the time, such hybrid material entities were regarded as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things, as at once unsettling and exciting, and as thus opening broad historical, cultural, and epistemic questions. Case studies will act as sites for fostering interdisciplinary research, examining the interplay of the study of material entities, cultural values, scientific inquiry, philosophical problems, and literary genres. Case studies of material entities provide a means to stage encounters between the different modes of inquiry, the different perspectives, the different kinds of texts and creative works seeking to comprehend them, reading each through and against its others.
Project Type: FundedFunders:
SSHRC
All Publications
Special Issue of Kabiri 4, 2024.
Approach to Teaching
My teaching reflects the different areas of my research. I teach the graduate courses Essays on the Philosophy of Freedom and Organisms as Instruments. At the undergraduate level I teach the courses Nature in Narrative, Visual Cultures and Natural Worlds and the first year general education course Science and the Humanities.
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Winter 2025 | AP/HUMA4228 3.0 | M | Nature in Narrative | SEMR |
