Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationReplay: The British Expeditionary Literature of Africa
Adrian Wisnicki
Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Reading between the lines of Victorian travel accounts, Wisnicki sees outlines of a bigger story — local peoples, landscapes, and ways of life. Wisnicki is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. For the past ten years he has served as the director (along with co-director Megan Ward) of Livingstone Online a digital museum and library devoted to the written, visual, and material legacies of British explorer David Livingstone. Wisnicki is the author of Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature.
Replay: 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
Time to Eat the Dogs 