Prof. Dr. phil. Staffan Müller-Wille

In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly, and Popular Practice

Funded by a Synergeia Grant from the Swiss National Foundation, four research groups will be investigating the bewildering variety of diagrams that have been used to conceptualize, determine, and produce relatedness in Western Europe and in spaces of European expansion since the Late Medieval Period. Rather than tracing the history of a particular idea or icon, such as the "tree of life", we aim for a comparative analysis of diagrams of relatedness. The project introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to diagrammatics that analyzes diagrams as techniques that transcend such binaries as ‘thought and action’ and ‘image and text’ and includes the reconstruction of the practices of collection, observation, experimentation, modelling, drafting, commenting, explaining etc. that inform diagrams of relatedness, as well as the politics of their production and use.

Staffan Müller-Wille's research group will focus on the longue-durée history of diagrammtic tools employed in the life sciences to depict, analyze, and integrate knowledge about relations of similarity, affinity, and descent among organisms. Two PhD students will study key periods of change: 1) the introduction of various dichotomous and tabular diagrams to illustrate plant and animal classifications at the end of the 17th cen.and accompanying debates whether these diagrams were able to capture ‘natural affinities’; and 2) the period around 1900 in which an increasing number of biologists conceptualized organismic variation as saltational and combinatorial, and accordingly developed diagrams like the Punnett Square that allowed to visualize this distinct logic.

For more detailed information, see project website.

Project-Team:
Andrea Ceccon
Niklaas Görsch

Knowledge in Transit: Linnaeus in Lapland (1732)

In den Sommermonaten des Jahres 1732 reiste der schwedische Medizinstudent Carl von Linné (1707–1778) durch die nördlichen Provinzen des schwedischen Königreichs. Die Tagebuchauzeichnungen, die nach Linnés Tod unter dem Titel "Lappländische Reise" (Iter Lapponicum) veröffentlicht wurden, gelten als Pionierwerk ökologischer und ethnographischer Feldforschung. Unser Projekt schlägt vor, dieses frühe Dokument wissenschaftlicher Reiseliteratur gegen den Strich zu lesen.  Das Wissen, das Linné während seiner Reise sammelte, entstand "unterwegs" (in transit), d.h. in der Passage durch Schnittflächen unterschiedlicher Kulturen, die von Gastfreundschaft, aber auch von Feinseligkeit, geprägt sein konnten.

Unsere Vision ist es, eine kritische online-edition des Reisewerks zu erarbeiten, und zwar während wir die Reise selbst nachvollziehen und mit lokalen Experten zusammenarbeiten. Übersetzung und Nachvollzug der Reise sollen dabei als Katalysator für kreative und experimentelle Diskussionen gegenwärtiger Probleme dienen, die von Nachhaltigkeit und Wohlstand über Klimawandel bis zum Verhältnis von staatlicher Hoheit und Indigenität reichen können. Indem wir Linnés eigene Methodologie in die heutige Zeit übertragen, hoffen wir neue Sichten auf die historische Überlieferung zu eröffnen, die es uns erlauben, die Entstehung und Autorität wissenschaftlichen Wissens zu hinterfragen.

Ausführlichere Details zu den Grundideen und dem gegenwärtigen Stand des Projekts finden sich hier.

Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences

The Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences provides advanced training in a lively international field that offers a long-term perspective on some of the most significant ideas, practices and institutions in the world today. The school, which has a tradition of association with the Naples Zoological Station, was revived in 2005 after a break of two decades and has run every other year since then. It is held in Villa Dohrn, the current Laboratory of Benthic Ecology and former summer house of the founder of the Naples Station, Anton Dohrn, situated above the port of the island of Ischia and overlooking the Gulf. Every two years, the event attracts twenty-six graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and nine expert international faculty. The past two schools were dedicated to the themes "Cycles of Life" (24 June to 1 July 2017) and "Life and Death" (23 to 30 June 2019). For news and general information, as well as detailed information on past schools, visit the website of the Ischia Summer School.