Insect Humanities
This working group brings together researchers interested in insects. We discuss the future of insect studies in the humanities and social sciences and ask methodological questions about insect research. Many existing insect studies are clustered around specific insect families and the particular interactions they have with humans both negative and positive. We are interested in what methods are promising for understanding insects within an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary context. In addition, we seek to understand knowledge systems regarding insects that lie outside the academic disciplines as traditionally construed.
The group’s core members have different temporal and geographic areas of expertise ranging from the 16th-20th centuries and covering most of the world’s continents. We have a wide range of interests from insects portrayed in art and used as commodities in the early modern period to pesticide use and concerns regarding the Anthropocene and the Plantationocene in the present day. The group is interdisciplinary in nature and we welcome curators, archivists, library professionals, scientists and many others. We intend to discuss: What is the role of insects in humanities? How do insects help us to think about non-human animal studies and multi-species relations? How do insects inspire new topics in the history of science?
Scholars studying the insect humanities represent a small but growing niche within the new turn towards non-human animal studies and multi-species concerns. Insects are a productive lens to study many current and pressing issues in the history of science. We find insects to be entities inspiring both wonder and joy.
The term ‘Insect Humanities’ was first published by Daniel Burton-Rose in 2020: “I term this body of scholarship Insect Humanities: engaging to varying degrees with social sciences such as anthropology and sociology as well as biology (particularly entomology), the primary disciplines involved are the humanistic ones of literary studies, history, philology, and religious studies.”
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Respectful Behavior Policy
Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.
Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.
Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.
Upcoming Meetings
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Monday, December 9, 2024 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST
Whitney Barlow Robles (Visiting Scholar, Dartmouth College) will present on her new book project, The Collector’s Paradox.
Abstract: A contradiction lurks behind most museum artifacts: to be preserved, they first must be
destroyed. Museums are not simply reliquaries that save things from oblivion. They are also the
angel of death, the grim reaper waiting at the door. Focusing on animal specimens and other
objects, The Collector’s Paradox excavates 300 years of collecting that created the modern
museum’s Janus face. It also brings a humanistic perspective to scientific debates raging over the
ethics of specimen collection and artifact preservation today, revealing both the emotions and
unspoken philosophical assumptions that underlie scientific work. The book draws on archival
research, interviews, and fieldwork to bridge past and present and reconstruct alternative
museum futures envisioned by historical collectors. Insects play a prominent role, as
entomology, among academic disciplines, sees the most collecting activity today given the sheer
number of insects yet to be discovered—and the perception that insects don’t feel pain as
humans do. This talk will outline the project as a whole, with particular attention paid to how
collecting coalesced into a more modern form across the twentieth century through the adventures of long-lived bee scientist Ted Mitchell, who likened his collecting mania to a drug addiction.
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Monday, January 27, 2025 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST
Tuomas Rasalnen
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Monday, February 24, 2025 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST
Leah Mahmut
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Monday, March 24, 2025 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EDT
Luisa Reis Castro
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Monday, April 28, 2025 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EDT
Erica Fischer
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Monday, May 26, 2025 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EDT
TBA
Past Meetings
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November 25, 2024
Caleb Shelburne (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University) will present "Leeches for the ‘Sick Man of Europe’: Science and the Environment in the Ottoman Leech Industry, 1830-1870," followed by a discussion.
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, leech-assisted bloodletting soared in popularity, dramatically increasing the demand for medicinal leeches across Western Europe. As wild leech populations in France, Great Britain, and Spain were overfished and depleted by the 1820s, merchants looked further east, particularly to the Ottoman Empire. Although Ottoman leeches had long been collected for local use, the intensification of the international market transformed these practices, leading to new state regulation, expertise, and ways of imagining and engaging the wetlands where leeches lived. This paper brings together environmental history and the history of science to examine the significance of the Ottoman places where leeches were gathered and stored. It shows how these places mattered historically in advertising, regulation, and natural biology, and how they still matter historiographically, to widen our understanding of medical theory and commodity production. I argue that Ottoman subjects’ knowledge and “Turkey” leeches themselves were vital to the industry but often obscured and distrusted further down the supply chain.
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October 28, 2024
Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Deparment of History, Vanderbilt University) will present "Elixir of Power: Bees, Honey, and Political Transformations in Early Modern Madagascar," followed by a discussion.
How have bees and honey been used in amplifying, performing and transforming relations of power? This talk explores this question through bee and honey-related historical practices in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As early as the sixteenth century, Malagasy political rulers employed cosmological practices that brought together the living, the dead, and the natural world. Within these was an understanding of the world as a space inhabited by invisible and invisible forces, ancestral presences, and key plants, animals and substances that possessed properties—bees and honey foremost among them. Royal rulers and ritual specialists from diverse polities across the island undertook practices—for instance, demands for tributes of honey; public consumption of honey-infused meals; and the use of honey-laced royal amulets—that centered bees and honey as key intermediaries between the living, the dead, and the invisible world of power. In this talk, I will share preliminary research, based on triangulated Malagasy oral histories, parables, and proverbs, travelers accounts and material culture artifacts, that tracks the active presence of bees; the rich, contested imaginative terrain of political rulers and commoners; and the ways in which insects and insect materials were central to spiritual and political transformations in the region. Although sometimes only glimpsed through their makings, bees were potent social catalysts in constituting the possibilities for dwelling and thriving in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
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September 23, 2024
Dr. Gene Kritsky (University of Illinois Professor Emeritus of Biology and former Dean of the School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University) will present on his book A Tale of Two Broods: the 2024 emergence of Broods XIII and XIV (Ohio Biological Survey, 2024), followed by a discussion. His talk will also discuss some of findings from 2024 emergence, and some of the cultural impacts that occured. Here is the abstract:
Every seventeen or thirteen years, millions of cicadas rise from the soil in the eastern United States to fill the air with their noisy song. But 2024 was a unique cicada year: periodical cicada Broods XIII and XIX emerged simultaneously. The last time these two broods emerged together, Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. A Tale of Two Broods: The 2024 Emergence of Periodical Cicada Broods XIII and XIX will discuss the natural history, evolution, behavior, cultural impact, and the historical record of these two broods extending back to their first recorded emergence in 1803.
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June 24, 2024
*************Rescheduled for November meeting*************
Caleb Shelburne (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University) will present "Leeches for the ‘Sick Man of Europe’: Science and the Environment in the Ottoman Leech Industry, 1830-1870," followed by a discussion.
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April 22, 2024
Dominik Hünniger (Curator for Innovation Research, German Port Museum, Hamburg) and Lisa Onaga (Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) in conversation with contributors Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Jude Philp, and Luísa Reis-Castro, discuss the new focus section 'Magnifying Insect Histories' in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Volume 115, Number 1, March 2024.
To access these readings for free please visit: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/2024/115/1
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March 25, 2024
Admire Mseba (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Southern California) will present on "The Challenges of Collaborative Locust Control in Late Twentieth Century Southern Africa, 1960s-1980s," followed by a discussion.
In the mid twentieth century, a plague of red locusts infested most of Southern Africa except the region’s southernmost tip. Threatening livelihoods across Belgium’s, Britain’s, and Portugal’s empire in Africa south of the equator, the plague, combined with advances in ways of knowing the pest, produced frenetic efforts at cooperation to control it. The result was the establishment, in 1949, of the International Red Locust Control Service (IRLCS). The workings of this organization and the broader work of locust control was, however, soon caught in the politics of decolonization. In the early 1970s, this cooperation completely unraveled because. The independent member states were unwilling to continue cooperation with racist regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. This talk discusses this entanglement of struggles against settler colonialism, international cooperation, and environmental control in late twentieth century Southern Africa—themes that scholars rarely address in a single narrative. It draws on archival materials from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, the South African National Archives (in Pretoria), the Free State Provincial Archives (in Bloemfontein), the National Archives of Zambia, the British National Archives (at Kew) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) archives in Rome, Italy.
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February 26, 2024
Matthew Robert Holmes (Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History at the University of Stavanger) will present on "Taxonomic Trouble: Colonial Plantations and the Cockchafer Beetle in Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka," followed by a discussion.
In the late nineteenth century, the British coffee industry of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) was decimated by a fungal disease. Facing economic ruin, British planters were also faced with insect pests, most notably beetles whose grubs attacked the roots of coffee trees. Scottish plantation owner and amateur naturalist Robert Camperdown Haldane attempted to tackle this entomological problem by producing a tract in 1881 titled All About Grub, in which he identified the island’s beetles as relatives of the European cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha) and listed methods to destroy them. Haldane’s taxonomy was erroneous and resulted in public embarrassment. His flawed beetle identification was a classic colonial misstep, driven by his faith in the authority of European entomology and his failure to engage with local knowledge. As a supporter of the acclimatization movement, Haldane saw Sri Lanka’s beetles as products of the climate and ecology of the island, assuming that they were variations of their European counterparts that had altered their behavior and life cycles to thrive in tropical conditions. He practiced a holistic approach to insect research, examining biological relationships, weather, and soil, but simultaneously remained a steadfast advocate of British expansionism and the exploitation of indentured labourers.
Matthew Holmes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History at the University of Stavanger, where he examines the modern history of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) in urban spaces. Matthew’s previous postdoc at the University of Cambridge investigated science and agriculture in the British Empire. His forthcoming book with the University of Pittsburgh Press, The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics, explores the creation of chimeral plants and animals. He also publishes on the history of biotechnology, morphology, and natural history.
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November 27, 2023
Columba Gonzalez-Duarte, The New School of Social Research
The ‘Other’-than-human and Justice Beyond Borders
In my ethnographic practice, I follow the migration of monarch butterflies to interrogate North America’s environmental ethics and border politics. In this presentation, I delve into the concept of more-than-human mobility justice by discussing the convergent migrations of humans and monarchs. Insect metaphors often represent either the repulsive or virtuous aspects of humanity. This association affects how societies imagine and construct ‘the human’ and the ‘other’-than-human. The virtuous anthropomorphized insect or the pestilent entomologized human are powerful examples of how metaphors and ideology work to trace boundaries. In producing ‘the pest’ or the noble symbol of humanity, soft and hard infrastructures are mobilized that reinforce national borders. In this intervention, I push back against the traditional Western justice framework, which assumes that individuals are isolated and sedentary, and which equates mobility rights with residency status. In its place, I propose a more inclusive ontology of mobility justice that includes both humans and more-than-human entities. This approach highlights how border justice can be served by recognizing multispecies interconnectedness.
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Columba González Duarte, Ph.D., is a Mexican socio-cultural anthropologist who studies the interaction between monarch butterflies and the human populations they encounter on their yearly migration across North America. Her main interest is in building environmental ethics beyond borders, and her project called “Convergent Migrations” has an activist dimension through which she hopes to foster “eco-social justice” for humans and other animals in migration. As a scholar born and raised in Mexico but working in Canada, she calls attention to the coloniality present in research and academic practices across North America. She also collaborates with the EMIGRA research team, funded by the American National Science Foundation (NSF), and a UNAM-funded project on Ecofeminist Latin-American Epistemologies.
Columba is an assistant professor at The New School for Social Research in the Anthropology department. She publishes in academic and non-academic venues regularly. She is currently writing a book supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation provisionally titled Entangled Mobilities: An Ethnography of Human-Butterfly Migration in North America".Click here to learn more about Columba's research, teaching philosophy, and other projects.
Click here to see a recent piece of Columba's work related to this talk: https://roadsides.net/gonzalez-010/
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October 30, 2023
Samuel R. Dolbee (Assistant Professor of History, D Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Studies of the Middle East at Vanderbilt University) will present on his book Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023), followed by a discussion. Here is the abstract:
In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.
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September 25, 2023
João Joaquim (University of Cambridge), will present on his work ‘Insect viruses as biocontrol agents in mid-twentieth century Britain’, followed by a discussion.
Here is the abstract:
This talk will examine the tentative use of viruses as biocontrol agents against insect pests in the UK during the 1950s/1960s. This is done through a focus on the research conducted by Kenneth M. Smith (1892-1981), a British virologist who was among those pioneering the study of insect viruses. Smith was recognised as an authority in this field and worked at highly reputed institutions. Yet, he failed in having viral biocontrol of insect pests adopted on a large scale. This failure is discussed in the context of post-war agroeconomic trends.
Relying on his entomological knowledge and connections in the insect breeding industry, Smith put together a specialised team and managed to conduct several successful trials in the industrial, agricultural, and forestry sectors. However, viral biocontrol methods were never adopted on a large scale and, by the late 1960s, interest in the topic seemed to have largely fizzled out. Ultimately, this paper questions what direction the use of these methods would have taken if the availability and convenience of chemical pesticides had not sidelined them. Furthermore, by examining Smith’s work, one glimpses a different side of virus research, where agricultural concerns shaped developments and where practices, techniques, and methods were solidly anchored in experimental biology and other knowledge traditions.
To read related work in advance please see João’s blog post ‘Paying Attention to Aphids’: https://www.cultivation.hps.cam.ac.uk/news/paying-attention-aphids-joao-...
Group Conveners
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Angélica Márquez-Osuna
Angélica Márquez-Osuna is a historian of science and Latin America, specializing in agriculture, farming practices, bee biodiversity and innovation in rural landscapes. She is currently writing her book on the history of beekeeping and industrial apiculture in the Americas. She is a 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University, and Assistant Professor of Latin American History in the Department of History at Loyola University-Chicago beginning in the fall of 2024. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2023.
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Deirdre Moore
Deirdre Moore received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2021 with her dissertation, 'The Heart of Red: Cochineal in Colonial Mexico and India'. Her research focuses on how complex relationships between humans, plants and animals led to the production of valued commodities in the Early Modern period with a concentration on the history of cochineal dye insects in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Deirdre's research has been supported by the American Indian Studies Graduate Student Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Research Grant, the Tyler Fellowship, Garden and Landscape Studies Department, Dumbarton Oaks and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada among others. Her main research interests lie in the Early Modern period, exploring connections in the history and origins of international trade, economic history and the history of entomology and insect interactions with human communities. She also makes films about insects.
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Harriet Ritvo
Harriet Ritvo works in the fields of environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, British and British empire history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) and the editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Her articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields. Her current book project, The Edges of Wild, concerns wildness and domestication.