William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography
Thursday, 24 June 2010 to Saturday, 26 June 2010Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge
Speakers' Biographies
Mirjam Brusius (University of Cambridge/British Library)
Mirjam Brusius holds an MA in art history, cultural studies and musicology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Parts of her coursework were completed at Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Since 2007 she is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis Preserving the Forgotten - William Henry Fox Talbot, Photography and the Antique explores Talbot's scientific interests and his role as an Antiquarian in connection to his photographic achievements. As part of her AHRC funded collaborative PhD project she is also a researcher at the project 'Science and the Antique in the Work of William Henry Fox Talbot' at the British Library, where she catalogued William Henry Fox Talbot's notebooks. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Dr Tony Crilly (Middlesex University)
Tony
Crilly is Reader Emeritus at Middlesex University. He is author of a biography Arthur
Cayley: Mathematician Laureate of the Victorian Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), of articles on the
history of mathematics, and books on mathematics for the non-specialist.
Dr Katrina Dean has been Curator of the History of Science at the British Library since 2006, was from 2004 a researcher at the University of Bristol, and previously worked at the National Archives of Australia and the Australian Science Archives Project. She is a member of the editorial board of the Electronic British Library Journal History of Science, Nature Geoscience, British Journal for the History of Science, Social Studies of Science and History and Technology. She has supervised several cataloguing projects including the Talbot Archive at the British Library in the role of co-supervisor for the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award project on 'Science and the Antique in the work of William Henry Fox Talbot'. and an advisor to the Sloane Printed Books Project. She has published several articles on various aspects of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century science in journals including History of Science, Nature Geoscience, British Journal for the History of Science, Social Studies of Science and History and Technology. She has supervised several cataloguing projects including the Talbot Archive at the British Library in the role of co-supervisor for the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award project on 'Science and the Antique in the work of William Henry Fox Talbot'.
Professor James
Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He writes on art and non-art images; his recent books include On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Visual Studies: A Skeptical ntroduction, What Happened to Art Criticism? and Master Narratives and Their Discontents. He edited two book series for Routledge: The Art Seminar (conversations on different subjects in art theory) and Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (short monographs on the shape of the twentieth century); currently he is organizing a seven-year series called the Stone Summer Theory Institute.
Dr David Gange (University of Cambridge)
Professor Frank James (Royal Institution, London)
Frank James is Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution, where he is also Head of Collections and Heritage. His main research concentrates on the physical sciences in the nineteenth century and how they relate to other areas of society and culture, for example art, business, media, religion, technology and the military. He is editor of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday, of which five volumes (out of six) have been published. He has edited a number of collections of essays including The Common Purposes of Life – a set of essays on the Royal Institution. His Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction will be published by OUP in November. He has been President of both the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and Technology and the British Society for the History of Science. He is President of the History of Science Section of the British Science Association for 2010.
Professor Robin Kelsey (Harvard University)
Robin Kelsey is Shirley Carter
Burden Professor of Photography in the History of Art and Architecture
Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Archive Style:
Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, and co-editor with Blake Stimson of The
Meaning of Photography. He is at work on
two new books, one about photography and chance and one about photography in
America during the Cold War. He has received several awards for his scholarship
and teaching, including the Arthur Kingsley Porter prize from the College Art
Association for an essay on the survey photography of Timothy H. O’Sullivan.
Professor Anatoly Liberman (University of Minnesota)
Anatoly Liberman was born and educated in the former Soviet Union (Leningrad-St. Petersburg) and had all the highest academic degrees from Leningrad University and the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. In the United States since 1975. Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Minnesota. His areas of expertise include general linguistics, the history of all the Germanic languages, folklore, medieval Germanic literature and mythology, and poetic translation. Over 500 publications, 18 of them books. The most recent books are Word Origins... and How we Know Them (OUP, 2005), An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction (2008) and A Bibliography of English Etymology(2009), both by the University of Minnesota Press (2008).
Professor Vered Maimon (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Vered Maimon serves as Zacks Vising Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her writing on contemporary art and photography appeared in October, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography and Parallax. She is the co-editor of Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke University Press, 2009).
Dr Chitra
Ramalingam (University of Cambridge)
Chitra
Ramalingam is a Mellon/ACLS postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for
Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the
University of Cambridge, and a visiting research fellow at the Science Museum,
London. She received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in
2009, and is currently writing a book on visuality in Victorian physics.
Dr Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge)
Eleanor Robson is Reader in Ancient Middle Eastern Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. An Assyriologist by training, her main research interests focus on the socio-political history of scholarship in ancient Iraq. She currently runs an AHRC-funded research project on The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700-200 BC. However, she also has a strong interest in the history and ethics of Assyriology, on which she has published several articles.
Professor Larry J Schaaf (Maryland, USA)
Professor Larry J. Schaaf is an independent photohistorian and consultant based in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He first came into contact with the Gernsheim Collection while teaching photography at The University of Texas at Austin. He subsequently researched and taught photographic history. A lapsed photographer, Dr. Schaaf is the author of numerous books and journal articles on the early history of photography. He was selected as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2005. Professor Schaaf is the Director of the online Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot .
Professor
Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)
Simon Schaffer is Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is a trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry and chairs its committee on collections policy.
Dr Anne Secord (University of Cambridge)
Anne Secord is an Affiliated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. The focus of her research and writings has been on popular, particularly working-class, natural history in nineteenth-century Britain, and on horticulture, medicine and consumption in the eighteenth century. She is completing a book to be published by the University of Chicago Press, focused on social class, observation, and skill in nineteenth-century natural history. She has also been commissioned to produce a new edition of Gilbert White?s Natural History of Selborne for Oxford Worlds Classics
Professor James Secord (University of Cambridge)Jim Secord is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, and a fellow of Christ's College. His research and teaching is on the history of science from the late eighteenth to the present. He has published several books, including Controversy in Victorian GeologyVictorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000). He has recently published on scientific conversation, scrapbook-keeping, and public scientific displays. His most recent publication is a selection of Darwin's evolutionary writings from Oxford University Press, which includes the autobiographical Recollections and responses to Darwin's books from around the world. He is currently completing Nature as News, a study of the relation between scientific practice and the newspaper press in London, Paris and New York.
Professor Graham Smith (University of St Andrews)
Graham Smith is a Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has been Editor of the international quarterly History of Photography since 2001. His most recent publications include ‘Light that Dances in the Mind’: Photographs and Memory in the Writings of E. M. Forster and his Contemporaries (Peter Lang 2007), Talbot’s Epigraph to The Pencil of Nature, History of Photography 34:1 (2010), and Time and Memory in William Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotypes of Oxford and David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s of St Andrews’, in Time and Photography , ed. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder (Cornell University Press / Leuven University Press 2010).
Dr John van Wyhe
Dr John van Wyhe is a historian of science and Senior
Lecturer in the Departments of Biology and History at the National University
of Singapore. He is the founder and Director of Darwin Online and is currently
setting up a similar research project on the life and work of Alfred Russel
Wallace. In 2009 he co-edited and published the first edition of Darwin's field
notebooks from the voyage of the Beagle (CUP).
