Humanities

-Lecture by John Sullivan, Ph.D. Student in History, Northwestern University. Recipient of the 2023–24 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Between 1788 and 1793, the Frenchman Louis-Benjamin Fleuriau de Bellevue (1761–1852) trekked the length of Italy and climbed its Alpine peaks, a long sojourn that capped his years of training as a geologist and natural historian. Toward the end of his journeys, he passed through Sicily and Calabria, in the peninsula’s far south, to observe the devastating aftermath of a series of earthquakes that had rocked the region in 1783. In this talk, John Sullivan will incorporate Bellevue’s travel notebooks into...

Conference organized by Anna Chen, Rebecca Fenning Marschall, and Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles The early modern period was a hothouse for the study of physical things in the natural world, and for the collection and assembly of them in human-made physical spaces. In other periods, botanical samples were preserved by diarists in their journals, such as the Clark Library’s Pressed specimens of butterflies and moths (1905), compiled by Yasushi Nawa (1857–1926). Nawa’s lepidochromic book showcases the technique of “printing butterflies,” or fixing the scales of their wings onto paper. Specimens of all sorts were admired for their variegated colors,...

The Clark Library preserves and provides access to over 130,000 books, manuscripts, and artworks dating from the 15th century to the present. But there is a library of living things on the five acres of green space outside the library's building, too. This event will bring together both our indoor and outdoor collections, as we explore nature’s histories – and its present! All ages are welcome to attend. Participants will learn about bees and beekeeping, go on bird walks, make their own field notebooks, plant seeds to take home from our heirloom seed library, learn how people in the past...