Lectures & Conferences

Lewis Walpole Library-Farmington Libraries Joint evening Talk, Farmington

Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, New Haven

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27th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

5:30 pm

53 Wall Street Auditorium, New Haven, CT 06511 (Please note the new location)

Free and open to the public

Professor of Insects and Worms: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his Life-Made World  

delivered by Jessica Riskin, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.  Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution.  Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism – he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings – brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble.  During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him.  Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes.  This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century.  In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making.  Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance.  The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them.

color photo head shot of Jessica RiskinJessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science.  Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind.  Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history.  She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. 

No registration required. Main entrance at 53 Wall St. and accessible entrance via Church St. Public parking after 5 pm in Yale lot 51 (on Temple Street). 

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Joint Lewis Walpole Library - Farmington Libraries Talk

Thursday, March 20, 2025

The giant, good-looking and slim, his legs disproportionately long, stands in a room surrounded by admiring spectators, most of whom come up to his midriff in heighte enormously thick leg, his other leg being thin. A fat lady (right) clutches the giant's coat. A fat parson gazes up at him and a dog fawns on his right leg. A buxom courtesan enters through a door on the left.

7 pm

The Lewis Walpole Library, 154 Main Street, Farmington, CT 06032

“Seen With Great Delight”: Spectacle in Georgian London

Curated by Alison FitzGerald, Associate Professor in the Department of History, Maynooth University
 

What was considered a “spectacle” in Georgian London? Was it a balloon ascent, a sophisticated silver swan that could mimic the appearance of life, a handsome Irish giant, an exhibition of paintings? This talk considers the broad spectrum of exhibitions that were presented to the fee-paying public during this period. From displays of art and mechanical ingenuity to scientific experiments and wondrous beings, all were commercialized in the bustling metropolis. Drawing upon materials in the Lewis Walpole Library, this talk considers what was regarded as eminently remarkable in this context. It also illustrates how some hapless spectators were satirized, making spectacles of themselves at the exhibitions that they had paid to see.

Head shot of Alison FitzGerald, a smiling woman with short blond hairAlison FitzGerald is Associate Professor in History at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her publications include Silver in Georgian Dublin: making selling consuming (2016),  Studies in Irish Georgian Silver (2020) and (edited with Toby Barnard), Speculative Minds in Georgian Ireland: novelty, experiment and widening horizons(2023).  Her current research focuses on exhibitions and urban spectacle during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

Seating is limited and registration is required. Register through the Farmington Libraries website.