'Joseph Banks, Science, Culture and the Remaking of the Indo-Pacific World': Announcement of AHRC-funded Network Project and Call for Papers

Announcement of Joseph Banks AHRC-funded Network Project
 
The National Maritime Museum (NMM), together with University College London (UCL), the Royal Society, the National Portrait Gallery  (NPG) and other project partners, is delighted to have been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Network Grant on ‘Joseph Banks, Science, Culture and the Remaking of the Indo-Pacific World’, which commenced on 1 June 2016.
 
The Network will bring together interdisciplinary and international groups of scholars from universities, libraries, museums and galleries to build on recent scholarship and to discuss new avenues for research in the build-up to the 200th anniversary of Sir Joseph Banks’s death in 1820.
 
A programme of events will include three academic workshops: the first will take place at UCL,  focusing on the historiography of Banks; the second workshop, at the  NPG, on  Science, Self-fashioning and Representation in Joseph Banks’s Circle; and the third, at the NMM, will focus on Banks and the Maritime World. A  larger, open conference at the Royal Society, will form the culmination of the network project in September 2017.
 
More details on the project including the steering committee, research outline, and the event programme, including  dates of the workshops and lists of workshop speakers, can be found at www.rmg.co.uk/josephbanksnetwork. More details, including paper abstracts and blog posts, will be added to the webpage as the project develops.

 
 
Call for Papers
 
The final  conference at the Royal Society, entitled ‘Joseph Banks: Science, Culture and Exploration’, will  take place on 14-15 September 2017 and will explore the intersections of Enlightenment science, culture, commerce and empire through the figure of Joseph Banks, his correspondents, circles and networks.  We are delighted that Professor David Igler, University of California, Irvine and Professor Kapil Raj, Centre Alexandre-Koyré, Paris  have agreed to give keynote addresses at the conference. We hope that the conference will attract speakers from a range of historical disciplines – including the histories of science, culture, art, anthropology and the maritime world – and will reflect the global contexts of Banks’s interests, influence and legacies.  We are particularly keen to receive proposals that see Banks as a starting point for new scholarly understandings of the worlds in which he moved. We anticipate that the conference will bring a broader and more nuanced appreciation of this energetic and powerful figure, and that it will play an important part in the development of a larger research project.  We encourage proposals from both the heritage and HE sectors and we anticipate that at least a selection of the papers given at the conference will be published.
Proposals including a title and abstract of no more than 500 words should be emailed to Sally Archer at sarcher@rmg.co.uk no later than 16 October 2016
Contact us
 
To submit a proposal or to find out more about how you can be part of the Network, please contact the project coordinator Sally Archer at the National Maritime Museum at: sarcher@rmg.co.uk
 
We would be grateful if you could please circulate this announcement, including the Call for Papers for the conference, to anyone you think would be interested. Thank you.