Lorentz Dietrichson Lecture 2021

Lorentz Dietrichson Lecture 2021 vil denne gangen gjennomføres i samarbeid med Nasjonalbiblioteket/Kartsenteret. 

Forelesningen er gratis og åpen for alle. Påmelding er ikke nødvendig. Velkommen!

Dr. Surekha Davies: SEA MONSTERS, SENSORY DISTANCE, AND MAPPING NATURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: 

RETHINKING EPISTEMIC IMAGES

Sea monster images on early modern European maps were visual prototypes intended to generate new knowledge about places that were inaccessible to human bodies and instruments. In places of sensory distance (which included worlds viewed through microscopes and telescopes, as well as ocean depths), nature was expected to operate differently and even to produce monstrous creatures. Drawing on Spanish, Italian, German, French, English, and Dutch sources, this paper casts the map as an epistemic multiplier: an image upon which other images sit in ways that are epistemically consequential. By analyzing how maps and their marine animals functioned as epistemic images composed through a process of forensic imagination, one can build a toolbox for the study of scientific images that are orthogonal to the grand narratives and affective worlds of art and science. This work entails cross-fertilizing history of science with art history, postcolonial studies, literary studies, and history of cartography. Understanding science as a visual pursuit requires that scholars correct for the blind spots generated by their own positionality in place and time vis-à-vis their visual archive.

Illustrasjon: “Monstra marina & terrestria, quae passim in partibus aquilonis inveniuntur,” in Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia universalis (Basel, 1550), lib. IIII (De regnis septentrion[alis]), 852-3.

Foto av Surekha Davies: Christ Hartlove

Om Surekha Davies: 

Dr Surekha Davies is the author of the award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge UP, 2016). She is a historian of science, art, and ideas at Utrecht University, and a member of the RSA Board of Directors, on which she serves as Fellowships Chair. In December she will be transcending the academy in order to work full-time on Humans: A Monstrous History under contract with the University of California Press as a lead trade title.