Flies of the genus Drosophila, and particularly those of the species Drosophila melanogaster, are best known as laboratory organisms. As with all model organisms, they were domesticated for empirical ...studies, but they also continue to exist as wild populations. Decades of research on these flies in the laboratory have produced astounding and important insights into basic biological processes, but we have only scratched the surface of what they have to offer as research organisms. An outstanding challenge now is to build on this knowledge and explore how natural history has shaped D. melanogaster in order to advance our understanding of biology more generally.
Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. InShakespeare's Ocean,Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime ...dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.
Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging fromThe Comedy of Errorsto the valedictoryThe Tempest,Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
Over the centuries, natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. ...They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public.At the heart of it all from the very start have been curators. Yet after three decades as a natural history curator, Lance Grande found that he still had to explain to people what he does. This book is the answer—and, oh, what an answer it is: lively, exciting, up-to-date, it offers a portrait of curators and their research like none we've seen, one that conveys the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. Grande uses the personal story of his own career—most of it spent at Chicago's storied Field Museum—to structure his account as he explores the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology. Throughout, we are guided by Grande's keen sense of mission, of a job where the why is always as important as the what.This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a clear-eyed but loving account of natural history museums, their curators, and their ever-expanding roles in the twenty-first century.
To this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active ...participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly.
Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic entanglement facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.
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