Object Lessons of Natural History: Organisms at the Boundaries of Life

This session takes its name, “Object Lessons,” from recent interest in thinking through objects or things across a variety of disciplines. Material entities have become newly valued for what they can teach us about our cultural and natural worlds. Arguably, natural history has long been engaged by the object lessons of particular material entities. Natural history does not simply involve practices of collecting or ordering of minerals, plants and animals, but is also suggestive of larger histories of nature and ecological relationships. The study of specific natural objects has often stimulated naturalists to rethink or rewrite the histories of nature they tell. The session looks in particular at how the pursuit of the simplest forms of life—algae, infusoria, fungi, phytoplankton—have prompted such rethinkings and rewritings. Living at the boundaries of the living world, often defying classification as plants or animals, the simplest animate beings have been found to offer complex stories about natural history. From the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first century, simple living beings have provided important object lessons for our understandings of the natural world.