Research
Current Research
I am currently adapting my PhD dissertation for publication as a monograph, and am preparing my post-doctoral research project, 'Remapping Enlightenment: Botany in Cultural and Global Context' Further descriptions of my research are available in the right hand panel.
Workshop: The Cultural Production of Natural Knowledge, 1700-1850
What were the cultural and aesthetic frameworks within which scientific and medical knowledge was created and communicated in the eighteenth century? In Autumn 2010 I and one of my former colleagues from Warwick, Dr Emily Senior, organised a workshop that investigated this question from an interdisciplinary perspective. The workshop took place at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick on 30 October 2010. Click here to go to the workshop website.
Research Networks
I am the former "Network Facilitator" for the research network entitled Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, 1851-1914. This is a Leverhulme-funded International Network based in the Department of English Literature at King's College London. We explore the trans-national flows of goods and people, ideas and technologies, and the transformations of local cultures that this movement brought about.
In 2009-10 I was also the Research Assistant for an ESRC-funded Early Career network entitled Connected Histories / Connected Sociologies: Rethinking the Global. This network, based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, addresses the history and sociology of global interconnections in light of postcolonial critiques of the ‘Eurocentrism’ of dominant approaches. Click on the titles of each project if you would like to know more about them.
Current research
This research project places the European fascination with botany during the Enlightenment in cultural and global context. It develops an approach within the history of science that takes into account how knowledge has been defined both through local practices and through the wider circulation of people and information. 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.
My PhD dissertation situates Enlightenment botany within the contexts of contemporary commercial culture and interantional networks of knowledge formation. I assess the connections between scholars, merchants and consumers in London and Paris between c. 1760 and c. 1815. I ask how individuals who profited financially from selling the commodities associated with science understood and related to the notion of a community of scientific practitioners. Working at the interface between science and commerce, I expose the diversity of socio-intellectual configurations that existed in the late eighteenth century.
Click here to read further