Northwestern Events Calendar

Mar
4
2019

John Tresch - "Barnum, Bache and Poe: The Forging of American Science"

When: Monday, March 4, 2019
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM CT

Where: Harris Hall, Room 108, 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: FREE

Contact: Janet Hundrieser   (847) 491-3525

Group: Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Speaker

John Tresch, The Warburg Institute

Title

"Barnum, Bache and Poe: The Forging of American Science"

Abstract

The founder of modern horror writing, Edgar Allan Poe, was an expert on the science of his time as well as a shrewd analyst of the effects of technical media. Now as then, new media often make it hard to know who or what to believe. This talk explores the relations between science and the demos by returning to the USA in the 1830s and 1840s, the era of Andrew Jackson, P.T. Barnum, and a communications revolution— in print, transport, photography, and telegraphy. Two opposed tendencies characterized this moment’s public culture: on one hand, an explosion of new periodicals, audiences, lecture halls, and authors; on the other, coordinated strategies by elite experts to control knowledge through centralized and hierarchical institutions. The Lyceum movement and Barnum’s “American Museum” typified the first; the U.S. Coast Survey, directed by Benjamin Franklin’s great grandson, polymath Alexander Dallas Bache, exemplified the second. Like Bache, Poe trained at West Point and wrote frequently about the sciences; yet he also invented new forms of literary sensationalism and publicity aligned with Barnum. In the decades before the Civil War, American science was being “forged” in two senses: in projects to establish a unified and regulated intellectual infrastructure, and in the production of believable fakes which fed popular skepticism. In a decisive moment of industrial modernity, Poe’s diverse works offer prophetic, incisive, and dramatically conflicted commentary on science, its publics, and the stories it tells.

Biography

John Tresch is Professor and Mellon Chair in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute. Trained in History and Philosophy of Science and in Anthropology, his work focuses on changing methods, instruments, and institutions in the sciences, arts, and media; connections among disciplines, cosmology, social order, and ritual; and shifting definitions of the rational and real. He has held fellowships at the New York Public Library, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and has been visiting researcher at King's College London and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

 

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