research interests

Dissertation Research

Professionalizing Science: British Geography, Africa, and the Exploration of the Nile

(This description was taken from my recent proposal to the 2021-22 Robert Penn Warren Graduate Fellowship at Vanderbilt University)

The history of how science professionalized is the history of empire, class, and transnational networks. Professionalization brought middle-class scientists into scientific disciplines at a time that the middle class increased their political and economic representation in wider society. Industrialization and colonialism brought a transnational dynamic that connected British scientific communities with continental, transatlantic, and colonial networks of knowledge production. The creation of distinct scientific disciplines occurred as universities and businesses emerged, alongside established learned societies, as venues for scientific research and funding. As scientists navigated networks, institutions, and practices that were in a state of flux, they also changed science, developing new conventions about scientific method, research management, and presentation of scientific findings.

British geography and its most visible enterprise, African exploration, played a central role in this transition. In charting geographers and explorers of Africa as agents of these changes, this project identifies the mid-nineteenth century as an inflection point in the organization, practice, and perception of science. Operating worldwide, explorers came from social groups that had not been part of the scientific community, such as career military men, adventurers, sportsmen, missionaries, and merchants. Drawn from diverse backgrounds, the British geographers of the late-nineteenth century drew financial and scholastic support from institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). This diversity in backgrounds further signaled a diversity in geographers’ motivations, including humanitarian, personal, political, and economic concerns. These clashed with the gentlemanly scientist’s idealized view of science as a disinterested pursuit. Geographers became vocal in their patriotic fervor and their enthusiasm for the imperial project. In the race to discover new lands, the potential of wealth and celebrity proved a tempting desire for many geographers. Geographers touted their enthusiasm for moral missions, such as religious conversion and abolitionism, as benefits of exploration. British geography served as a microcosm of British science by reflecting how societal changes intersected with scientific practices and knowledge production.

I examine British geography from the 1830s to the 1930s in the context of these societal, economic, and academic changes. Centered on the exploration of the Nile Valley, my study examines these changes in three parts. In the first section, I evaluate how geographers fashioned their personas as scientists to respond to prevalent social, professional, and ideological pressures in the context of Nile exploration from 1830 to 1870. They did so in part by bolstering geographers’ scientific credentials to include a greater emphasis on measurement and the translation of exotic field notes into more “scientific” records. Changes in the basic practices of scientific work took place against the background of a new landscape of learned societies and institutions in financing and sponsoring expeditions and fieldwork, such as the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). I investigate how scientists navigated the transition to institutional support instead of the personal wealth or patronage that existed during the era of the gentlemanly scientist.

In the second section, I examine geographers’ transnational support networks to assess the degree to which the internationalization of scientific communities was integral to trends of professionalization. With the financial backing of the RGS, explorers could assume the personal risks of venturing into Africa without the financial restrictions imposed by their own wealth, or lack thereof. Thus merchants like John Petherick, soldiers like John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant, hunters like Samuel White Baker, and missionaries like David Livingstone became explorers. They came from social classes previously excluded from scientific knowledge production. Instead of the private financial support indicative of Alexander von Humboldt’s South American expedition or the explicit military nature of James Cook’s voyages, I show that the RGS functioned as a hybrid of a privately supported and state- sanctioned organization reminiscent of the private-public partnerships defining scientific practice in the twentieth century.

Third, I conclude my study by looking at the work of scientists associated with the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratory in Khartoum. Founded by the pharmaceutical magnate Henry S. Wellcome to foster the economic and scientific development of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the wake of the Mahdist War, the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories in Khartoum became one of the region’s primary scientific research centers. From 1903 to 1935, the laboratories published research on the epidemiology, pharmacology, entomology, and the medicinal anthropology of Sudan. I document the ways in which Henry Wellcome’s patronage of Henry Morton Stanley and the RGS guided his decision to donate funds for the creation of the laboratory. Further, I show that researchers stationed at the Wellcome laboratory relied upon the knowledge and practices of prior explorers in the course of their work. I argue that these continuities complicate our understanding of histories of disciplinary geography; that instead, exploratory field work functioned as an antecedent for the fieldwork of other scientific disciplines.

For more information as to my historiographic intervention and my research plans, feel free to look at my dissertation prospectus: Link.