Representing Darwin : Art, Taxidermy and Bio-politics at the Darwin Museum Moscow, 1907-2009

This paper looks at aspects of the relationships between art, taxidermy, bio-politics and the shifting representations of Darwinian evolutionary theory within the history of the Darwin Museum, Moscow from 1907 to 2009. The museum began in 1907 at the Higher Womens’ Courses institute in Moscow, with a collection of stuffed birds belonging to the founder, Dr Aleksandr Kots. It was nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and opened to the general public in 1924. Soviet Decrees in 1926, 1946 and 1968 promised the construction of a dedicated building, which, however was only realised after the fall of the USSR, opening in 1995. Today it is the leading natural history museum in Russia, designated the Scientific, Informational and Methodological Centre of the Russian Association of Natural History Museums, under the Russian National Committee of ICOM – the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History. What the new museum explicitly shares with its previous incarnations is a commitment to the use of art - including graphics, painting, photography, sculpture, taxidermy, as well as the art of museum display - as means to engage the viewer with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and to emphasise the variety and variation in nature. Indeed, many of the current exhibits include art works and mounted specimens dating back to the earliest days of the museum’s existence. Today, as in the past, the displays are designed by artists in conjunction with curatorial subject experts. In narrating a partial history of the museum, I want to draw attention to the mesh of connections and contrasts with western approaches to Darwinian science and museological representations of evolution. Among the connections, are the use of taxidermy and art to provide an educational spectacle, particularly for the education of women; links with zoopsychology, early genetic science and discourse on eugenics; as well as reference to a ‘progress’ model of human evolution common in popular culture. The differences relate to how Darwinism was politically, and scientifically nuanced within shifting historical contexts: as intrinsically, politically radical in the pre-revolutionary era; as the basis for understanding and prompting a new stage of human evolution in the Revolutionary1920s-30s; and as diametrically opposed to genetic science in the Lysenkoist period between 1938 and the 1960s. I will begin by looking briefly at the role of taxidermy, leading on to consider the Museum’s engagement, firstly with issues of micro-evolution, and secondly with macro-evolution, where I will focus particularly on approaches to the evolution of humankind.Peer reviewe

Look into the Light : Panas Tytenko (1963-)

A group exhibition of paintings by the Tytenko family. With works by Panas Tytenko, Oksana Tytenko and Olena Yakovenko. 64 page catalogue, introduction by Ihor KharchenkoNon peer reviewe

A generic operational metatheory for algebraic effects

We provide a syntactic analysis of contextual preorder and equivalence for a polymorphic programming language with effects. Our approach applies uniformly across a range of algebraic effects, and incorporates, as instances: errors, input/output, global state, nondeterminism, probabilistic choice, and combinations thereof. Our approach is to extend Plotkin and Power’s structural operational semantics for algebraic effects (FoSSaCS 2001) with a primitive “basic preorder” on ground type computation trees. The basic preorder is used to derive notions of contextual preorder and equivalence on program terms. Under mild assumptions on this relation, we prove fundamental properties of contextual preorder (hence equivalence) including extensionality properties and a characterisation via applicative contexts, and we provide machinery for reasoning about polymorphism using relational parametricity

A Cold War curiosity?: The Soviet collection at the Darwin memorial museum, Down House, Kent.

This article has been accepted for publication in Journal of the History of Collection, published by Oxford University Press.In the late 1950s-early 1960s, the Charles Darwin memorial museum at Down House in Kent acquired a collection of Soviet paintings, sculptures and photographic albums, none of which are currently on display to the public. These artefacts were sent to the UK from the State Darwin Museum in Moscow, by its directors, the ornithologist Professor Aleksandr Kots and his wife, the animal behaviourist, Dr Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots. The ostensible reasons for the gifts were largely connected to anniversary celebrations of Darwin’s life and work. The focus on art works related to the Darwin Museum’s particular concern with the use of art to stimulate and inform visitors without the use of too much text in the displays. This article explores the potential impact of the contemporary, Soviet and international, ‘Cold War’ debates over ‘Lysenkoism’ and ‘Soviet Darwinism’, on the short-lived display at Down House, entitled the ‘Russian Room’ (c.1961-1964).Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

‘A Sort of Modern[ist] Vitalism? Darwinism, Art, Politics and Soviet ‘Evolutionary Therapy’ in WWII’

© 2019 The Author. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) For further details please see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.This paper speculatively explores the vitalist implications of the propagandistic visual presentations about Darwinism and natural history given to wounded Soviet soldiers and grieving widows during WWII, by the Directors of the Darwin Museum (Moscow) and their son, Rudi. Post-war, as a reward for such activities, these individuals were all given medals extolling their patriotism and contributions to the defence of Moscow against the Nazi invaders. Apparently, the Soviet government regarded their activities as having been politically and ideologically significant. Why? As Aleksandr Vucinich has argued, vitalism and neo-vitalism in their more metaphysically orientated forms seem to have held no real interest for Russian experimental bio-scientists and natural historians. This was to carry on into the Soviet period. Yet, as Vucinich has also argued, the blurring of boundaries within Russian (and later Soviet) scientific thought, between Darwin’s notion of the “struggle for existence” and apparently Lamarckian ideas on the inheritability of acquired characteristics and the action of will, allowed for a vitalist element to continue to exist in Soviet Darwinism.My argument will suggest that both the impetus towards the wartime activities of the Moscow Darwin Museum, and the accolades awarded by the Soviet government, may relate to a non- metaphysical element of vitalism, buried deep inside the Russian and Soviet construct of Darwinism, and increasingly entrenched during Trofim Lysenko’s rise to power.Peer reviewe

Review of \u3ci\u3eMinority Discourses in Germany since 1990\u3c/i\u3e

Both scholarly and popularized examinations of Germany during the 1990s hotly debated the “new normal” of its national politics and cultures, from the so-called “Leitkultur” (guiding culture) of the late 1990s to the plural, intersectional identities within the Federal Republic, among them “Ossis,” “Wessis,” and the multiple minoritized groups negotiating various points on the peripheries. ... The ten essays in the volume, published in the Spektrum Series (volume 23), engage the discursive plurals of intersectional identities and their positions visà- vis dominant whiteness in German-speaking Europe since German unification and the later founding of the European Union in 1993. To achieve a kind of coherence or common cause across the essays, the editors focus the discussions on Black Germans, Turkish Germans, and Jews in Germany. Without making any claims to being comprehensive in scope nor intention to exclude other minoritized groups, such as the Sinti and Roma or Asian and Arab Germans, Minority Discourses advances a coherent thesis about the urgent need for including multiple subject positions and vocal registers in the effort to refocus the projection of a “German” image as hegemonic. The collective impact of this volume makes strides toward dismantling the binary oppositions between white Germans and all others. The strengths of the volume are based in the depth and breadth of the analyses

Art History, Politics, Heritage

Patricia Simpson, ‘Art History, Politics, Heritage’, poster presented at Public Engagement with Research, Hatfield, UK, 23 June, 2015.Peer reviewedDownloa

Two Models for the Teaching of Science-Related Social Issues

In the past ten years, major reports have appeared criticizing the educational system. A number of these suggest that schools are not producing adults willing to take an active citizenship role in society. Such reports as A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983) and The Carnegie Report (Boyer, 1983) are among many general education studies which address this point. Reports from specific content areas (Harms & Yager, 1981; Patrick & Remy, 1985; Ramsey & Hungerford, 1988) have also voiced concern regarding a seeming lack of American interest in dealing with the many science, technology and society (STS) issues which face the nation today

The Meaning of Production: Art in the GDR

Presented in longer form ... at the opening of the exhibition Twelve Artists from East Germany, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 10 February 1990