American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
In this virtual program Whitney Barlow Robles discusses her recent book, a compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives. Part history of science, part modern voyage tale, and part personal journey, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History poses questions such as: Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know?
Animals and the questions they raise thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment—a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. In Curious Species Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they struggle to fathom animals today.
In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.
Whitney Barlow Robles is a writer, historian, and curator based in North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in venues such as Slate, Nautilus, and The William and Mary Quarterly and garnered honors including the Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences from the History of Science Society, the Bowdoin Prize in the Natural Sciences from Harvard University, and the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize.
Robles has also worked in a curatorial and editorial capacity at the Harvard Art Museums and the American Museum of Natural History. Most recently, she curated a prize-winning, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded, digital exhibition titled, The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science, This interactive exhibition tells the stories of centuries-old food artifacts that have survived to the present, despite their perishable nature, by being preserved in far-flung scientific collections.
Robles received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and was a member of Dartmouth’s Society of Fellows from 2019–2022. She was a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at AAS in 2017-18.