Conversations on Nature: Science and the Public in the Victorian age and now

This event is organized by AHRC Large Grant ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ as part of Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities.

This open, hands-on demonstration will recreate a Victorian ‘conversazione’: one of the most important forums in which the public engaged and contributed to science in the Victorian age.

In the Special Collections Centre of the David Wilson Library at the University of Leicester, the event will focus on scientific images that helped make new approaches to nature accessible to broad audiences, both in the nineteenth century and now.  Presented by researchers from the AHRC-funded Constructing Scientific Communities project, it will demonstrate both the range and often exquisite beauty of Victorian natural history illustrations, as well as the different formats in which nature was put on display in the nineteenth century.