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Project 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.

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