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Joan Steigerwald
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities, and the Graduate Programs in Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and Social and Political Thought at York University. My research interests explore the intersections of the history of the life sciences and environmental history, German idealism and romanticism, and science and technology studies.
My recent book Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800 examines attempts to develop a science of biology. It explores how the endeavor to delimit experimentally the organic from the inorganic blurred the boundaries of life, and how instrumental investigations of organic vitality acted as media shaping the understandings of life. These epistemic concerns were also central to the philosophies of nature developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, from those of Kant to Schelling. Reading German philosophies of nature against the grain of many idealist expositions, I argue that the material and contingent conditions of life opened critical judgments of organic phenomena to dialectical irresolution and boundary concepts. Romantic figures, such as Goethe and Novalis, also took up these experimental and epistemic concerns in their own practical investigations and figurative representations of natural phenomena. The book is concerned with how life became a problem in the years around 1800, and argues for reconsidering the significance of the ways that problem was explored at the time for our subsequent understandings of life.
My new book project, A Romantic Natural History, explores how historians, philosophers and writers drew upon contemporary natural histories, even as their works inspired a reimagining of nature and history. The turn of the nineteen century was marked by a complex interface between human and natural histories. Because natural history was occupied with questions of origins and transformations, with the generation and degeneration of not only plants and animals but also human beings, its projects of investigating the natural world and improving the natural economy were inseparable from questions of social, moral and religious import. A Romantic Natural History is interdisciplinary in method. It draws upon the works of naturalists and scientists, writers and artists, and philosophers and historians during the Romantic period. It is informed by recent scholarship in the history of science, history of philosophy, cultural history, studies in romanticism and material cultural studies. The book is organized as a series of essay on specific natural history objects and their larger significances. The objects are selected because of their amphibious character. They do not fit neatly into simple categories of plants, animals and mineral. They are not simply understood as natural, artificial, historical or cultural. They are material entities with semiotic significance. They were regarded at the time as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things and opening up broad epistemic and cultural questions.
My recent book Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800 examines attempts to develop a science of biology. It explores how the endeavor to delimit experimentally the organic from the inorganic blurred the boundaries of life, and how instrumental investigations of organic vitality acted as media shaping the understandings of life. These epistemic concerns were also central to the philosophies of nature developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, from those of Kant to Schelling. Reading German philosophies of nature against the grain of many idealist expositions, I argue that the material and contingent conditions of life opened critical judgments of organic phenomena to dialectical irresolution and boundary concepts. Romantic figures, such as Goethe and Novalis, also took up these experimental and epistemic concerns in their own practical investigations and figurative representations of natural phenomena. The book is concerned with how life became a problem in the years around 1800, and argues for reconsidering the significance of the ways that problem was explored at the time for our subsequent understandings of life.
My new book project, A Romantic Natural History, explores how historians, philosophers and writers drew upon contemporary natural histories, even as their works inspired a reimagining of nature and history. The turn of the nineteen century was marked by a complex interface between human and natural histories. Because natural history was occupied with questions of origins and transformations, with the generation and degeneration of not only plants and animals but also human beings, its projects of investigating the natural world and improving the natural economy were inseparable from questions of social, moral and religious import. A Romantic Natural History is interdisciplinary in method. It draws upon the works of naturalists and scientists, writers and artists, and philosophers and historians during the Romantic period. It is informed by recent scholarship in the history of science, history of philosophy, cultural history, studies in romanticism and material cultural studies. The book is organized as a series of essay on specific natural history objects and their larger significances. The objects are selected because of their amphibious character. They do not fit neatly into simple categories of plants, animals and mineral. They are not simply understood as natural, artificial, historical or cultural. They are material entities with semiotic significance. They were regarded at the time as crossing the boundaries of kinds of things and opening up broad epistemic and cultural questions.
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