ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

A phenomenon in the Renaissance that proliferated Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the cabinet of curiosities was in essence a personal collection of rare, unknown and marvelous objects. Popular, visual and encyclopedic in their approach, these cabinets, or Wunderkammern, included a diversity of specimens from both known and newly discovered worlds–from unicorn tails to monkey teeth, Indian canoes to phosphorescent minerals, carrots to pinned insects. These collections of curious objects that are seemingly not human in nature require the idea or application of human characteristics and traits to describe their inhuman state. In this act of collecting, categorizing, displaying and recording, the idea of a Natural Order and what it meant to be human were thrown into question by philosophers, scientists, theologians, and poets alike. Taking a broad view of this cabinet of curiosities, the seminar’s aim is: 1) to investigate the varied, changing, and possible forms of the cabinet itself (e.g. personal collections, Natural History museums, aquariums, zoos, circuses, scientific notebooks, anatomy halls, libraries and scriptoriums); 2) to examine the curiosities that were/are collected (e.g. artifacts, fossils, internal organs, organisms both rare and common, maps, cultural objects, literary texts, art); and 3) to evaluate and reflect upon the manner, instruments, and results of such collecting (e.g. use of the microscope, surgical instruments, optics, and galvanism, as well as the creation of museum guide books, specified taxonomies, and rubrics of Science and Religion).

Friday, March 24

Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Greek Open University / University of London “Objectifying the Human, Humanising the Object: Modern Avatars of the Cabinet of Curiosities”
Kirk Coffey, Goldsmiths College, University of London
“The Curiosity Cabinet as a Current Mode to Know”
Brandon Lunsford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
“From the Cabinet of the Classes to the Museum for the Masses: Museums and Entertainment in the 19th Century”
Stephanie Shirilan, Brandeis University
“Cabinets in Reverse: Staging the European Body as ‘Curiosity’ in Representations of New World Encounter”

Saturday, March 25

Temple Burling, Carthage College
“Modern Biological Databases as Present Day Cabinets of Curiosity”
William Nolan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Eadweard Muybridge; Capturing Life at the Intersection of the Zoo and the Cinema”
Rachel Poliquin, Independent Scholar
“Walter Potter’s Museum and the Natural Order of Taxidermied Kittens”
Lesley Pleasant, Kutztown University
“Pre/post/humou(r)sly posing: Gunther von Hagens’ ‘Rearing Horse and Rider’”

Sunday, March 26

Janelle Schwartz, Hamilton College
“Putting Polyps into Powder Jars: The Implications and Applications of the Spontaneous Generation Debate”
Ronald Bosco, University at Albany, SUNY
“Cabinets of Curiosity at First Sight: Emerson’s Day in the ‘Jardin des Plantes,’ Paris, and the Origins of Transcendentalism”
Jan Olesen, Universtiy of Alberta
“The Ark of the Museum: Transformation of the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities”
Amy Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Object Tradition: The Cabinet of the Aesthete”