@dbenjw
Asst. Prof. of Literature at Bard College • fmr Harvard Society of Fellows • Victorian & South African Literature, Env. Humanities • THE ART OF UNCERTAINTY (Cambridge, 2024) • doi.org/10.1017/9781009436120 • www.danielbenjaminwilliams.com
It was a true pleasure to review Natalie Prizel's phenomenal _Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies_ for Genre!
All interested in #Victorian literature and art, + in histories of #disability and queerness, read this book!
#OpenAccess here:
read.dukeupress.edu/genre/articl...
It was a true pleasure to review Natalie Prizel's phenomenal _Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies_ for Genre!
All interested in #Victorian literature and art, + in histories of #disability and queerness, read this book!
#OpenAccess here:
read.dukeupress.edu/genre/articl...
If you need to read about snow-crystals for some reason today, I have something for you… ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
And once you’re nicely beveraged, join the Theatre Caucus at 8 in the Hampton Ballroom for Lady Audley’s Secret!!! @navsa2025.bsky.social
If you’re at @navsa2025.bsky.social please join us for the 🍃VCOLOGIES HAPPY HOUR🍃from 7-8 this evening!!!
We’ll be in the Marquee Bar and Lounge: complimentary beer/wine for grad students, first come, first served!
Reposting now the images load correctly—dm me if you need a free link!
❄️ Thx to Vcologies friends, esp. @kateflint.bsky.social, @devo3000.bsky.social, Liz Miller, @mortizrobles.bsky.social, @benjaminmorgan.bsky.social—& @pfyfe.bsky.social, one of two v. helpful readers! ❄️
doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
Reposting now the images load correctly—dm me if you need a free link!
❄️ Thx to Vcologies friends, esp. @kateflint.bsky.social, @devo3000.bsky.social, Liz Miller, @mortizrobles.bsky.social, @benjaminmorgan.bsky.social—& @pfyfe.bsky.social, one of two v. helpful readers! ❄️
doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
Excited to hear what you think!
Screenshot of article abstract. Text: Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background.
Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.
“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC!
I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️
doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
Screenshot of article abstract. Text: Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background.
Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.
“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC!
I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️
doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
Join the ranks of fabulous recent essays on the #Victorian Pacific + #Romantic lyric; on museums, collections, archives; on ecology, hydrography, atmosphere; on immunology, race and portraiture; and more!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...
My periodic call for pitches to the 19th-Century Networks section of ✨Literature Compass✨:
Do you have a state-of-the-field essay to propose on #Romantic or #Victorian topics? a little-known or understudied author to spotlight?
Please get in touch!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...
I’m afraid not!
Join the ranks of fabulous recent essays on the #Victorian Pacific + #Romantic lyric; on museums, collections, archives; on ecology, hydrography, atmosphere; on immunology, race and portraiture; and more!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...
My periodic call for pitches to the 19th-Century Networks section of ✨Literature Compass✨:
Do you have a state-of-the-field essay to propose on #Romantic or #Victorian topics? a little-known or understudied author to spotlight?
Please get in touch!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...
ABSTRACT: Despite (or perhaps because of) its distance from Britain, the Pacific islands occupied complicated symbolic and material terrain in Victorian culture. Home to major settler populations in New Zealand and Australia, the Pacific was also an exotic tourist destination, the setting for popular adventure novels and travelogues, a field laboratory for the burgeoning disciplines of ethnography, biology, and race science, and one of the last battlegrounds in the global scrabble for resources. This essay surveys the small but rich body of scholarship that has emerged over the past 30 years to elucidate Victorians' engagements with the Pacific. In particular, this essay highlights the unique challenges and opportunities posed by its study: attending to the Pacific requires us to rethink our terminology, expand our archives, refine our methods, and interrogate our approach to Indigeneity. As such, a survey of scholarship on this still somewhat marginal subject offers insights into the state of Victorian studies more broadly, at a juncture in which the field is reorienting itself toward the global.
🌊 Please read Lindsay Wilhelm's marvelous state-of-the-field essay on the ✨ VICTORIAN PACIFIC ✨, out now in Literature Compass!!!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
What this long and detailed NYT piece calmly calls an “extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual” is in fact a blatantly unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s Article I powers and delegation of the President’s Article II duties.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...
list of banned keywords
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
Deadline is tomorrow!
The Vcologies Working Group announces the 2025 Early Career Paper Prize. The prize recognizes work by rising scholars that exemplifies the Vcologies effort to consider ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945. Early career scholars working in any field are eligible. Graduate students and contingently employed colleagues are especially encouraged to submit. "Early career" is defined as a scholar of any rank or affiliation who is working toward a PhD, or who has received the PhD in the past three calendar years (2021 or later). PhDs from 2020 are also eligible to apply in cases where parental duties or medical leave have affected research. The winning paper will be selected according to three criteria: (1) Potential significance for Victorian studies and its relation to the study of ecology, broadly construed; (2) Quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; (3) Clarity and effectiveness of presentation. Papers will be anonymized before being forwarded to three judges. The prize award is $250 Submission Guidelines The prize is open to papers of no more than 3,500 words (not including notes, image captions, or references) written by early career scholars. Please submit papers in MS Word or PDF (with no identifying information on the document itself), along with (as a separate document) a cover sheet stating (1) your name, (2) year of Ph.D. (or year expected), (3) name of your degree-granting institution, (4) title of your essay, and (5) contact information, to Kathleen Frederickson at kfrederickson@ucdavis.edu. Submission deadline is January 31, 2025.
6th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥! Please share/RT!
If you have a paper that fits the bill, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945,” do consider submitting!
Deadline: Jan. 31, 2025
Award: $250
“Uncopyrightable” is the longest word in English to use each of its letters no more than once. —Christian Bök
how, specifically, does freezing research dollars hurt your state's economy?
link for deets by state. keep in mind this is separate from all the other programs that support public schools, provide food for kids, supplies for hospitals, equipment for infrastructure.
www.faseb.org/science-poli...
✨“the realist novel’s embrace of doubtful futurity is fundamental to its efforts at verisimilitude.”✨
Gratified by this alert, generous, sympathetic review of my book by Alicia Rix in @thetls.bsky.social!
buff.ly/4asoJpL
'...the habit of speculation is rife in Victorian fiction, and particularly incurable among Thomas Hardy’s fortune-tellers and gamblers.'
Alicia Rix on indecision in the Victorian novel
✨“the realist novel’s embrace of doubtful futurity is fundamental to its efforts at verisimilitude.”✨
Gratified by this alert, generous, sympathetic review of my book by Alicia Rix in @thetls.bsky.social!
buff.ly/4asoJpL
The Vcologies Working Group announces the 2025 Early Career Paper Prize. The prize recognizes work by rising scholars that exemplifies the Vcologies effort to consider ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945. Early career scholars working in any field are eligible. Graduate students and contingently employed colleagues are especially encouraged to submit. "Early career" is defined as a scholar of any rank or affiliation who is working toward a PhD, or who has received the PhD in the past three calendar years (2021 or later). PhDs from 2020 are also eligible to apply in cases where parental duties or medical leave have affected research. The winning paper will be selected according to three criteria: (1) Potential significance for Victorian studies and its relation to the study of ecology, broadly construed; (2) Quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; (3) Clarity and effectiveness of presentation. Papers will be anonymized before being forwarded to three judges. The prize award is $250 Submission Guidelines The prize is open to papers of no more than 3,500 words (not including notes, image captions, or references) written by early career scholars. Please submit papers in MS Word or PDF (with no identifying information on the document itself), along with (as a separate document) a cover sheet stating (1) your name, (2) year of Ph.D. (or year expected), (3) name of your degree-granting institution, (4) title of your essay, and (5) contact information, to Kathleen Frederickson at kfrederickson@ucdavis.edu. Submission deadline is January 31, 2025.
6th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥! Please share/RT!
If you have a paper that fits the bill, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945,” do consider submitting!
Deadline: Jan. 31, 2025
Award: $250
@emmadavenport.bsky.social @navsa.bsky.social @clareclarke.bsky.social @aliped.bsky.social @nathankhensley.bsky.social @taliaschaffer.bsky.social @christopherpittard.bsky.social @dbenjw.bsky.social @susannegruss.bsky.social @c19qmul.bsky.social @19birkbeck.bsky.social
And our Introduction to ✨Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century✨ is free to read!
compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....