IFK 2017-19 Postdoctoral Researcher Jennifer P. Daly specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history of science, with a secondary field in American history. Daly’s book project, The Evolutionary Universe, examines the Romantic roots of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought through case studies that reveal the universal (as opposed to strictly biological) scope of transformist thinking. Her research spoke directly to IFK’s tradition of breaking disciplinary boundaries by showing how Romanticism's emphasis on the unity of nature and natural law created a unifying framework in which contemporary figures found vibrant transformist connections between practices of knowledge, including cosmology, theology, natural history, literature, and the emerging sciences of humanity. This project anchored Daly’s larger research agenda to understand how people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought knowledge of nature at its most speculative and unobservable: the cosmic, the microscopic, the distant, the ambiguous, the invisible.
Daly is particularly interested in the way in which the methods of the historical sciences and humanities (i.e., those concerned with nature's past, humanity's past, or both) developed at the confluence of practices of knowledge. Historical practices of knowledge, concerned as they are with an unobservable past, are inherently speculative to one degree or another. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a wide variety of disciplines confronted the essential problem of historical knowledge: a single individual could not directly observe much less empirically manipulate events of the distant past, nor could he or she directly observe processes that took place over thousands, millions, or billions of years. Daly argues that thinking historically about nature and human societies—including transformist or evolutionary modes of thought—required a place for imagination in natural philosophy. Romanticism encouraged such an application of imagination across disciplines, and justified speculative leaps through its unifying and universalizing framework for knowledge.
Related IFK Courses:
- KNOW 21408: History of Medicine (Winter 2018)
- KNOW 21409: History of Extraterrestrial Life (Spring 2018)
- KNOW 21415: Evolution Before Darwin (Winter 2019)
- KNOW 40304: Between Nature and Artifice: The Formation of Scientific Knowledge (Spring 2019)