Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationReplay: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain
“An ideal head, destitute of character” Johann Lavater, 1792.
Rachel Walker talks about physiognomy — the study of the human face — and why it was so popular among scientists and the general public in the 18th and 19th centuries. Walker is an assistant professor of history at the University of Hartford. She is completing a book based on her dissertation, “A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1860.”
Rachel Walker
Replay: New Insights about Darwin
Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the Historian of Life Sciences at the Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He’s the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation.
Alistair Sponsel
Inuit Testimony and the Search for Franklin’s Ships
HMS Erebus in the Ice, François Etienne Musin, 1846
David Woodman talks about his quest to find the missing wrecks of the Franklin Expedition, a mission that led him to the journals of the Arctic explorer Charles Hall who lived with the Inuit for four years and recorded their encounters with British explorers. Woodman is the author of Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, a book that correctly predicted the site of HMS Erebus discovered by Parks Canada in 2014.
David Woodman Credit: John Murray
Replay: Women Wanderers of the Romantic Era
Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature, particularly in the work of women writers. Horrocks in an associate professor in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814.
Ingrid Horrocks
Science, Islam, and Evolution
Indian Postal Stamp of Sayyid Ahmad Khan
Sarah Qidwai talks about her research on Sayyid Ahmad Khan as well as her own journey to Mecca and Medina. Qidwai is a Ph.D candidate in the History of Science at the University of Toronto. Her essay “Reexamining Complexity: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Interpretation of ‘Science’ in Islam” is in the edited collection Rethinking History, Science and Religion: Exploring Complexity published this year by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sarah Qidwai
Replay: Creatures of Cain
Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II. Milam is a professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America.
The City Built by Travel
The West Indian Social Club of Hartford
Fiona Vernal talks about the travel experiences of Hartford’s many communities. Vernal is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She’s the creator of the exhibition “From Human Rights to Civil Rights: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Housing Struggles in Hartford County Connecticut, 1940-2019” currently showing at the Hartford Public Library.
Fiona Vernal
