The Politics of Natural History - Einzelansicht

Following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century German naturalists sought to explore and categorize the world. To them, the Australian continent offered a welcome opportunity to test Humboldt’s methods on a terrain hitherto largely unknown to European voyagers and scholars. As a result, this generation of scholars and their collections have played a decisive role in the production of knowledge about the fifth continent in both Germany and in Australia. The past years have seen an increasing scholarly and public interest in this entangled history of science, as well as in the colonial contexts within which such knowledge and many of the artefacts in European institutions were acquired. Our seminar will engage with this complex topic through a case study of the Australian collections held by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (MfN).
The seminar is taught in cooperation with a similar course by PD Dr Eva Bischoff at the University of Trier. We will discuss the MfN’s history, its collections, and its exhibition practice and aim to jointly develop a concept for an audio guide that will make our findings tangible for visitors to the museum.

This course is taught in a mixed format with asynchronous assignments and occasional Zoom meetings, which will take place during seminar times.

Working knowledge of German is required, as sections of the course will be taught in German, and some of our course readings will also be in German.