Landscapes Below Speaker Series

Milstein Seminar Rooms, University Library
Thursday 25 January, 17.30-18.30

THE WONDERS OF THE PEAK: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY GEO-TOURISM IN DERBYSHIRE

Anna Rhodes, Collections Officer at Buxton Museum & Art Gallery

In 1636 Thomas Hobbes published his topographical and satirical poem The Wonders of the Peak. This popular verse described visiting some of Derbyshire's geological wonders, including limestone caverns and natural wells. Hobbes' poem publicised this landscape and by the eighteenth century, these sites were teeming with visitors. Descriptions and engravings of the sites were published in magazines and they attracted artists including Joseph Farrington, Philip James De Loutherbourg and William Gilpin. This talk explores how these geological 'wonders' were represented on both paper and canvas in the eighteenth-century. It draws on many unpublished travel journals, examining how the visitors engaged with the geological landscape. These often sensationalised descriptions, written by both men and women contain tales of perilous adventure, eerie visions into other worlds and the stirrings of modern geology.

Further information, and a link to book tickets, here.

Future events:

• 'The Role of Women in the History of Geology' - Tuesday 20 February
• 'George Cumberland, fossil collecting and landscape painting in early 19th century Bristol' - Thursday 22 March

All details and booking information can be found here.

Footprints in the Sand: the Hugh Miller Writing Competition II 2017-2018

Further details on the Scottish Geology website here.

UL exhibition: Landscapes Below: Mapping and the New Science of Geology

A new, fascinating exhibition on mapping and geology by Allison Ksiazkiewicz (who completed her MPhil and PhD in HPS) at the University Library. See here for a good overview, and sign up here for special tours of the exhibition led by Allison.

The exhibition runs from November 25, 2017 to March 29, 2018 at Cambridge University Library's Milstein Exhibition Centre. Admission is free. Opening times are Mon-Fri 9am-6pm and Saturday 9am-16.30pm. Closed Sundays.

Conference - The Society of Arts and the Encouragement of Mineralogy and Geology, 1754-1900

The registration page is open for the forthcoming HOGG conference, The Society of Arts and the Encouragement of Mineralogy and Geology, 1754-1900, to be held on 9th November, 2017 at the Geological Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London.

For more information and to register, please see the website.

The Society of Arts’ role in the history of geology and mineralogy is a generally overlooked aspect of development of our disciplines, which this conference will begin to rectify and, hopefully, to stimulate further research. We look forward to seeing you there. Please feel free to forward this notice to friends and colleagues who could be interested but who may not yet be members of the History of Geology Group.

Talk - 'The Earth's history in image and print'

Professor Martin Rudwick (HPS, Cambridge) will be presenting 'The Earth's History in Image and Print' on Wednesday 16th November at 8.45pm in the Friend's of Peterhouse Seminar Room, organised by the Cambridge Bibliophiles.

Lecture - The Geological Turn: The Anthropocene and how we tell history

Thursday, September 29, 3:30 in Seminar Room 1, Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Scientists tell us the Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. Human history and Earth history are now commensurable and entangled. Beyond environmental history, what does this geological turn do to historical research? After decade of a "social-only" paradigm in the social sciences and humanities, how can we explore and tell the joint history of human societies and of the Earth system?

Stories matter for the Earth. The stories that the elites of industrial modernity have told themselves have been cultural drivers of the new geological regime we now live in. Similarly the kinds of stories we today tell ourselves about the Anthropocene can shape the kind of geo-historical future we will inhabit. The talk will cross-examine some key grand narratives of the Anthropocene (a mainstream naturalist narrative, a post-nature narrative, an eco-catastrophist narrative, and an eco-Marxist narrative) and reflect upon how history (and history of science) can be written and told in a new epoch.

Christophe Bonneuil is a Senior researcher in history of science, science studies and environmental history at the Centre Alexandre Koyré  (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research explores the co-evolution of ways of knowing and ways of governing nature and the Earth. He has recently published a global environmental history of the Anthropocene (The shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, history and us, Verso, 2016, with J-B. Fressoz) and edited The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis : Rethinking Modernity in a new Epoch, (Routledge, 2015, with C. Hamilton and F. Gemenne).

MAP - Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815

Two hundred years after the publication of the first geological map of an entire country, this  anthology, edited by Michael McKimm, collects new work by over thirty poets inspired by William Smith.

INCLUDES NEW POEMS BY:

Stephen Boyce ● Alison Brackenbury ● James Brookes ● Andy Brown ● Alan Buckley ● Peter Carpenter ● John Wedgwood Clarke ● Jane Commane ● Elizabeth Cook ● Barbara Cumbers ● Jonathan Davidson ● Isobel Dixon ● Maura Dooley ● Sally Flint ●  John Freeman ● Isabel Galleymore ● John Greening ● Philip Gross ● Alyson Hallett ● Ailsa Holland ● John McAuliffe ● Matt Merritt ● Helen Mort ● Andrew Motion ● David M. Orchard ● Mario Petrucci ● Kate Potts ● Peter Robinson ●  Penelope Shuttle ● George Ttoouli ● Anthony Wilson

To purchase a copy, see here.

A review by John Henry is on the History of Geology Group blog here.