April 10, 2025
Dr Nathan Bossoh, Research Fellow in History at Southampton University (UK)
Title: Access, Imperial Exploitation, and the Curation of New Botanical Futures
Abstract: Between July 2024 and February 2025, an exhibition I co-curated opened to the public at the Wellcome Collection, London entitled The Kola Nut Cannot Be Contained. The exhibition sought to explore new ways of narrating human stories about botanical collections through its singular focus on the kola nut, a small bitter-tasting fruit found growing across Western African tropical forests. This methodological approach was adopted as a way to counter the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ style displays common during the European colonial period and still often utilised today. Global plant collections found in contemporary Western museums, herbaria, and botanic gardens are typically the result of European histories of colonial extraction and exploitation - histories that are still largely hidden within botanical scientific circles. However, as my exhibition demonstrates, museums are slowly becoming spaces where marginalised collections and cultures are being brought to light as a way to critically re-evaluate dominant imperial histories. In this exploratory talk centring around 1) the ongoing Kew Gardens re-location controversy, 2) histories of colonial collecting, and 3) my recent exhibition, I will expand upon the three core themes of access, exploitation, and curation as a way of opening further dialogue on the role of museums in the creation (and curation) of new botanical futures.
Collection Ecologies intersects history and philosophy of science with the history of natural historical and medical collections, and environmental history. The concept of ecology offers new pathways into the history of collections, both to understand how collections can serve as archives and knowledge repositories in the history of the environment, but also by developing a reflection on collections as ecologies themselves. Reflecting on collections as ecologies in themselves enables the group to open up disciplinary boundaries in order to reassess the value, stabilization, transfer, loss, and transformational potential of bio-cultural collections to create new transdisciplinary methodologies. The sessions will consider the following questions as a starting point - but not limited to this list-such as: how are museums, collections and affiliated infrastructures reimaging and configuring environments – virtually, digitally, and physically? What tensions arise from collecting, displaying, and reconstructing natural things that have shaped and continued to shape environments? Reversely, how have conceptions of the environment shaped the reconstruction of the natural things ex-situ, in museums? How can we think together about how materiality and practices intertwine and impact knowledge in times of environmental change?
Consortium 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
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
Thursday, June 12, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
Dominik Hünniger (German Port Museum Hamburg)
&
Anita Guerrini (Horning Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Oregon State University)
Title: Collection Ecologies Endeavour Special Issue Work-in-Progress Sesssion
Group Conveners
Katherine Arnold
Katherine Arnold is Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Liverpool. She is a historian of the German, British, and Dutch Empires, the history of science and environment, and global history in the long nineteenth century. She is primarily interested in subjects related to natural history collecting and collections; nonhuman and multispecies histories; museums; botany and botanic gardens; taxonomic debates; and biodiversity loss and climate change. Katherine holds BA degrees in history and anthropology from the University of South Carolina, an MA in European history from University College London, and has undertaken research through affiliations with the University of Cape Town and Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her PhD in international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 and was previously Director of Academic Programs at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU München).
Nuala Caomhanach
Nuala Caomhánach is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History at New York University and the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the American Museum of Natural History. Her dissertation examines the relationship between scientific knowledge, climate change, and conservation law in Madagascar. She illuminates how changes in the botanical sciences of ecology and phylogenetics have affected conservation ideology, policy, and practice. She is a contributing editor at the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog both inviting and editing article submissions, and writing blog posts. She contributes to the Journal of the History of Ideas's Broadly Speaking Series. She co-produces the Not That Kind of Doctor podcast with Dr. Grace East. The podcast invites PhD students and early career scholars to discuss their research in an informal manner.
Deborah Dubald
Déborah Dubald is a Lecturer in the History of science and health at the University of Strasbourg, with a specialty in the history of material cultures of nature, science and health. She holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence (2019), entitled “Capital Nature: a History of French Municipal Museums of Natural History, 1795-1870”, (hdl.handle.net/1814/6530) for which she won the James Kaye Memorial Prize in 2020. She is a member of the CollectionEcologies collective, with whom she examines relations between history of collections, material cultures of nature and science, and environmental history.She recently co-edited with Catarina Madruga (Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin) a special issue for the Journal of History of Knowledge It was published at the end of 2022 and is entitled “Situated Nature: Field collecting and local knowledge in the nineteenth century” (https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/situated-nature).Her current research is split between the writing of her first book on the French natural history museums in 19th century France, and a new project on the uses of medical collections, especially human remains but not exclusively, in academic (research and teaching) practices from 19th to 21st century.
Catarina Madruga
Historian of zoological colonial collections held in European museums with origin in the African continent, Catarina Madruga defended her PhD in the University of Lisbon titled "Taxonomy & Empire. Zoogeographical knowledge on Portuguese Africa, 1862-1881" in 2020. Together with Déborah Dubald she edited the special issue for the Journal for the History of Knowledge "Situated Nature," in 2022: https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/situated-nature. With Katja Kaiser, she published, in 2024, "Tagging Objects from Colonial Contexts" https://kulturgutverluste.de/en/news/new-working-paper-published-colonial-contexts. She has previous training in Museum Studies and work experience in both Exhibition Design and Museum Education.