Continuing Professional Development Seminar

The Empirical Imaginary and the History of Science: Women’s Art and Writing in the Nineteenth Century

 

Wednesday, 6 June 2018

4.30-6pm, with afternoon tea from 4pm

Room 275, Global Change Institute (Building 20), The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD

All welcome. RSVP by Monday 4 June to uqche@uq.edu.au

This seminar examines intersections between scientific investigation and creativity in art and writing by women in the nineteenth century. We will focus on the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, the watercolour landscape paintings of Charlotte Canning, and the poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as the career and botanical writing of Georgiana Molloy. Our discussion will consider how empirical practices such as collecting, classification, and documentation were central both to the development of the natural sciences, and to women’s modes of social and artistic expression. This will allow us to explore how these figures’ contributions to science relate to their positions as women artists.

Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, c.1839-46. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

CPD certificates of participation will be available for teachers of English, Visual Art, History, and Science.

 

Presenters:

Sushma Griffin is a Project Officer with the UQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and a PhD candidate in the School of Communication and Arts at UQ, where her research focuses on nineteenth-century Indian architectural photography.

Dr Jessica White is a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in the UQ School of Communication and Arts, where she is writing an eco-biography of the nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy. She is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement.

Xanthe Ashburner is Education and Outreach Officer with the UQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She holds an MPhil in modern American poetry.

 

Image: sheet from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, c.1839-46. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

 

 

Venue

Room 275, Global Change Institute (Building 20), The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD