Am Donnerstag, 02.06.2022 findet im Rahmen des Institutskolloquiums "Wetter/Wissen: Kulturanalytische Perspektiven auf Zustände der Atmosphäre" folgender Vortrag statt:
Katharine Anderson, York University: The Ambitions of the Mobile Observer: Weather Knowledge Far from Home (ZOOM)
Abstract
This talk takes the case of a single nineteenth-century figure, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland (1846-1888) in order to examine persistent concerns with the shifting scales of weather knowledge. Famous as astronomer pioneering high altitude observation, Smyth has a reputation primarily as an eccentric in his meteorological work. His works on meteorology late in life such as “Madeira Meteorologic” (1882) and “Clouds Forms that Have Been” (1895-96) seem among his most eccentric productions, and they are more than tinged with a religiosity that has helped them pass into obscurity. Smyth’s approach to meteorology was both consistent and intriguing. To Smyth, meteorology represented the challenge and complexity of visual observation as well as the wearying work of accumulating and centralizing satisfactory instrumental data. Meteorology also valued singularities. For Smyth, this question of singularity encompassed particular bodily sensibilities, such as those of his invalid wife, on the one hand, and extreme weather events, on the other hand. Both kinds of singularity affected Smyth as a travelling observer, who brought both his intellectual and political sense of meteorological science to his journeys. Tracing Smyth’s interests, we can see the distinctive ways meteorology shifted from individual to cosmic scales of experience.
My research in general has explored the history of environment and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century. After Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (2005), I turned to Victorian voyage narratives and hydrography, interested in science, travel and empire. Recently, my ‘early pandemic’ project was to finally complete a transcription of J. Clunies Ross’ lengthy satire of the Beagle voyage. I am working on a book about the ocean environment and the global perspective in 1920s and 1930s titled The Modern Ocean. I also co-edit the interdisciplinary University of Chicago Press series Oceans in Depth with Helen Rozwadowski.
Wir laden herzlich dazu ein, am Donnerstag, 02.06.2022 um 17:00 Uhr online beizuwohnen:
