At the end of the eighteenth century, the University of Heidelberg (re-)assembled various cabinets and private collections to what they considered as a ‘scientific’ collection. In the following century, the zoological, botanical and palaeontological collections of the University grew continuously due to donations, purchases and exchanges with other institutions. Limited funding and institutional changes, at the same time, led repeatedly to the reorganisation of the collections. In the twentieth century, when material objects became less important for teaching and research in many disciplines, some of the collections fell into oblivion or were partly dissolved.

This brief story of the collections at the University of Heidelberg might sound very familiar to many historians of collections and collecting. In the course of the nineteenth century, many museums and universities (re-)assembled cabinets and private collections following specific ways of classification, conservation and exhibition, which were considered to be the ‘scientific standard’ of the time (Pearce 2008; Delbourgo 2018; Curry/Jardine/Secord/Spary 2018). In addition, the European imperial expansion and the transformation of landscapes enabled the significant growth of many of these collections (Habermas 2013; Schär 2015; von Brescius 2018). From hunters, foresters and local guides to engineers, carpenters and natu-ralists, these processes involved a wide variety of different people. This workshop focusses on how these ‘scientific’ collections in university and museum contexts came to be, how they were constituted and constantly re-assembled.

While especially parts of some larger collections have gained attention by historians of collecting, science and museology, this has usually not been the case for university collections and provincial museums. Based on archival research, the study of these smaller institutions can contribute to and enhance the historiography of collecting and collection. The archive of the University of Heidelberg, for example, provides ample evidence of the everyday practic-es, rationales and conflicts of such smaller collections, which were imbedded into the local society as well as regional and global networks. Finally, from the largest to the small provin-cial collection, their history were hardly linear stories of success (Achim, Deans-Smith, Ro-zenthal 2021). Many collections were dissolved, objects got lost or were treated with chemical substances turning them into serious health hazards today.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from different collections – large and small, housed at museums and universities – to discuss their commonalities and specificities. Thereby we intend to discuss some general questions: What were the factors – economic, political, personal, cultural or social – that favoured some collections to be established or dissolved? Who was involved in setting up, arranging, housing, and displaying scientific collections?
While we are interested in exploring this broad topic from all possible angles, we also sug-gest three main strands of enquiry:

1) At the beginning of the twentieth century, many university collections housed not only zoological, botanical and archaeological specimens and objects from their immediate sur-roundings, but in most cases from all continents. The question therefore arises as to who collected these objects – from the neighbouring forest as well as far away – and why did they send them to a specific institution? Can specific networks be identified that are typical of certain collections? And, finally, to what extent were these collecting activities and networks related to socio-economic transformations and the European imperial expansion?

2) From hunting and picking to conservation and integration into the collection to the inter-pretation and publication of research findings, a huge number of actors were involved in the production of knowledge. In the 19th century, these processes experienced an increasing differentiation based on the division of labour. Some of those involved in collecting activities achieved great recognition while others were rendered invisible. But how exactly did these processes of (in)visibility work and to what extent were they related to specialisation and differentiation?

3) The study of the ‘biographies’ of objects and collections has proven to be a promising approach in the history of collecting and collections. This approach allows studying the shifting meaning, materiality and afterlives of objects. Therefore, we also welcome contributions who follow the trajectories of objects and collections and ask how they gained, maintained and might have lost their particular meaning of being a ‘scientific’ object or collection. How did the material shape of these objects change in the process and what other meaning might they have possessed?

Besides suggestions that focus on the above described themes and offer theoretically or empirically informed papers, we are also welcoming submissions that are more explicitly concerned with how scientific collections reach audiences – whether in historical or contemporary settings.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, together with a short biography per email to christian.stenz@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de AND susann.liebich@zegk.uni-heidelberg by 15 December 2024.

We will be able to cover accommodation and – as long as funding is available – most of the travel costs (most economic option) during the workshop for participants. This workshop is generously supported by a grant from the Research Council Field of Focus 3, “Kulturelle Dynamiken in Globalisierten Welten”, of Heidelberg University.