Description:

Speakers: Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College and Laurie Wood, Florida State University

Title: Lost and Found: Science, Gender, and Race in Enlightenment Guyane

Abstract: In 1767, the free woman of color Charlotte Dugée absconded from the Patris botanical expedition, for which she was a French state-appointed specimen illustrator, into the forests of Guyane, never to be heard from again. Unlike typical Enlightenment scientific practitioners – overwhelmingly white, male, Europeans – Dugée had been born in the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, a woman of mixed race and possibly recent manumission. But she had also attained the rare status of brevet, an official designation of expertise, usually granted to scientific practitioners with metropolitan reputations and royal patronage. This talk probes this paradox to center women of mixed race in the story of colonial and Enlightenment science.