Alumna, History and Cilivization
University of Warwick, History
Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology, The Huntington Library
Thesis Title: Cultivating Commerce: Connoisseurship, Botany and the Plant Trade in London and Paris, c. 1760-c.1815
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Maxine Berg
Colin Jones |
About
I am a 2011-12 Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington Library, California. My research examines the relationship between eighteenth-century science, consumer culture, and the histories of global travel and expansion, with an emphasis on French and British networks.
I am at present completing my first book, which is based on my PhD dissertation, completed at the University of Warwick in 2010. Cultivating Commerce situates the social history of botany in eighteenth-century Britain and France within the contexts of contemporary commercial culture and global networks of knowledge formation. I show that botany in both countries was implicated in, and affected by, the changing structures of early modern markets, the gendered history of connoisseurship, and the evolution of cosmopolitan relationships in the face of nascent nationalism.
My second research project examines how knowledge about nature has been defined both through local practices and through wider circulations (and appropriations) of people, objects and information. It places the European fascination with botany during the Enlightenment in cultural and global context. The project will uncover the histories of lesser-known botanical collectors who featured in eighteenth-century correspondence networks, and will study how people, specimens, scholarly knowledge and cultural artefacts moved, circulated and influenced each other. It will thus unite the history of science with cultural history, situating these in global context. The intention is to decenter the national frameworks through which much of the history of natural history has been written.
Overall, my work is driven by an interest in understanding how knowledge circulated within eighteenth-century society, and what the social and cultural consequences of this circulation have been. I argue that the cultural history of science, transnational history, and gender history are key to better understanding eighteenth-century society and culture more generally.
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