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Dear all,

Don't miss the last term seminar in the Instructing Natural History Seminar Series:

Prof. Tim Fulford. “Empire of Skulls: Headhunting and the Discourse of Natural History in the Late 18th Century”

Date:
7 December, 15.00–16.00 C.E.T.


Location: Hybrid: Zoom and the Rausing Room at the Department for History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala .
To
register
for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se
Abstract:

"Skulls were the ultimate hard ‘facts' upon which
 Enlightenment natural historians built a racist pseudo-science—a hierarchy of races in which Caucasians appeared at the top and black people at the bottom. In this talk I shall examine the practice of collecting the skulls of indigenous peoples as a consequence
 of an inherent feature of Linnaean and post-Linnaean Natural History—the drive to gain scientific power by building a universal classification of phenomena organised by agreed procedures of mensuration. I shall investigate how European headhunting went hand-in-hand
 with British colonialism, outline the racial theories constructed upon this ‘evidence’ and critique the biased methods by which the skulls were interpreted as revealing indigenous people’s inferiority. I shall focus on the headhunting network that centred
 on Sir Joseph Banks and linked two of the foremost instructors in Natural History — the Gottingen professor J. F. Blumenbach, whose lectures and manuals educated generations of Natural Historians, and the London anatomist John Hunter, whose lectures and demonstrations
 placed native peoples nearer to the apes than Europeans." 

Bio:

Tim Fulford has written many books and articles on Romantic-era literature, science and culture. Among his current projects are an edition, for Cambridge
 UP, of The Letters of Thomas Beddoes. He has previously edited, with Sharon Ruston, the letters of Humphry Davy, for Oxford. Before that, he published, with Cambridge, a co-written monograph on science and literature in the early British Empire, focusing on
 the work of Joseph Banks. This was entitled Bodies of Knowledge. His monograph on Wordsworth’s later poetry, Dialogues with the Dead, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

With best wishes,

Linda

Linda Andersson Burnett Ph.D.

Wallenberg Academy Fellow

Department of History of Science and Ideas / Inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria

Uppsala University / Uppsala universitet

https://instructingnaturalhistory.com/

Latest publications / senaste publikationer:

'Collecting humanity in the age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Edinburgh University’s natural history museum', Global Intellectual History (2022)

'Humanity on the move in the era of Enlightenment and colonisation', Global Intellectual History (2022)