Guest Scholar: Gregory Nobles
Co-sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture and the EcoTarium

As much as we talk about “citizen science” today, the notion has been around since the founding of the nation. In the century following the American Revolution, long before “scientist” became a profession pursued by people in academic and corporate laboratories, science seemed to be almost everywhere in American society, and almost everyone—“gentlemen of science” but ordinary people as well—could take part in scientific inquiry. This workshop seeks to recapture the spirit of that time when science seemed accessible in so many ways. By looking creatively at the wide range of visual resources available at the American Antiquarian Society—scientific texts and images, of course, but illustrated newspapers and magazines, cookbooks, seed catalogs, children’s books, prints, and ephemera—workshop participants will develop a fresh understanding of the many ways Americans encountered science in their everyday lives and, by doing so, may become better aware of our own engagement with science in the current day.

Gregory Nobles, professor of history emeritus at Georgia Tech, is the 2016-2017 Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS. A member of AAS since 1995, he has served the Society in a variety of roles, delivering the Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book (2003) and leading the American Studies Seminar (1998) and the CHAViC Summer Seminar (2014). His new book, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in March 2017.

Registration

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