Doctoral Theses in Progress

Abstract

Jean Bonfa's 1696 map offered the most accurate portrait in its day of the Comtat Venaissin. Commissioned when France threatened the region economically and politically, the map's topographical detail and allegorical themes exhibit a political geography favouring papal interests. Yet the map's coordinates for Avignon reflect neither Bonfa's skill as a positional astronomer nor his collaboration with the Paris Observatory. Finally, because local authorities controlled the distribution of Bonfa's map, it was not available to other cartographers.     

Political Tourism: Elizabeth Simcoe’s Maps and Views of Canada (1791–1796)

Abstract

Elizabeth Simcoe (1762–1850) travelled from England to Canada in 1791 and returned to her home, Wolford Lodge, in Honiton, Devon, in 1796. She was accompanying her husband, John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806), who had just been appointed Lieutenant Governor of the newly formed province of Upper Canada. Throughout their travels, Elizabeth recorded her Canadian experiences in her diaries and sketchbooks. She drew, corrected and copied maps for her husband. Upon their return to England they offered to the king an album of 32 works and a map, all drawn on birch bark. The map and the album acted as a report to the king of her husband’s political achievements in Canada and her engagement as a cartographer.     

A 5th‐Century‐AD Sewn‐Plank River Barge at St Maria in Padovetere (Comacchio‐FE), Italy: an interim report

This article reports on the remains of a 5th‐century‐AD river barge excavated in 2014 and 2015. Most of the flat bottom and one side are preserved. The barge is at least 20 m in length and 2.9 m across the floor, and is constructed using sewn planks, iron nails and mortise‐and‐tenon fasteners. Both flush‐laid and lapstrake planks are recorded. Archaeological, historical, iconographic and ethnographic evidence is used to propose explanations for features, such as the use of lapstrakes, a possible steering system and platform, and the likely position of a pump, while setting the barge in the context of the North Adriatic shipbuilding tradition.     

The Dercum-Muybridge Collaboration and the Study of Pathologic Gaits Using Sequential Photography

In the late 1870s and 1880s, prior to the development of movie cameras or projectors, English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) photographed sequential images of people and animals in motion, using arrays of sequentially triggered single-image cameras. In 1885, Philadelphia neurologist Francis Dercum (1856–1931) collaborated with Muybridge at the University of Pennsylvania to photograph sequential images of patients with various neurological disorders involving abnormal movements, and particularly various gait disorders, including both the sensory ataxic gait of tabes dorsalis and various spastic gaits. Dercum used tracings of sequential photographic images to plot trajectories of limbs as a way to characterize and distinguish pathologic gaits. The Dercum-Muybridge collaboration produced the first motion-picture sequences of neurological gait disorders ever filmed. These sequences and the trajectory-based studies that derived from them were a milestone in studies of pathologic gaits.     

When fashion met industry. Biki and Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (1957–72)

In 1957, Silvio Rivetti (1921–61), heir to a long-standing Italian entrepreneurial dynasty and owner and manager of Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT), asked Biki (Elvira Leonardi Bouyere, 1906–99) to design sketches for a womenswear collection to be produced by GFT. Conventionally considered by fashion historians as the first example of a collaboration between the fickle world of fashion and rationally planned industrial production, the partnership between the couturière and the biggest Italian clothing company never really succeeded and eventually resulted in failure, in 1972. The origins and development of the collaboration, its relevance for the evolution of commercial law, the economic value of the GFT collections designed by Biki, and the market response to them are the main topics dealt with in this paper. Based on historical sources unknown until now, it aims to show that the GFT–Biki partnership can be considered a milestone when studying the relationship between fashion and industry.     

Establishing an Ideologically Coherent History

This article analyses the historical culture of the Swedish Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SAP) during its formation in the last decades of the 19th century. Utilizing the theoretical concepts of myth and conceptual metaphor, the sense-making aspects of historical narration are studied, especially the way coherent stories are told, in which the movement under formation is made part of a long history leading to a desirable future. The SAP utilized history both morally-defensively and tactically-offensively. The moral use of history depicts Jesus, Münster, and the French Revolution, establishing the righteousness of revolt. The revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, during which the workers are seen as acting more independently, are depicted in a way that draws attention to tactical aspects; lessons are learned on how the workers should act in a revolutionary situation. As has been shown to be the case regarding national narratives, the sense-making mechanisms of historical narration also tend to appeal to issues of identity. The metaphorical conceptualization of ideas and movements as individuals and families further underlines these issues.     

American neurophysiology and two nineteenth-century American Physiological Societies

This article contrasts two American Physiological Societies, one founded near the beginning of the nineteenth century in 1837 and the other founded near its end in 1887. The contrast allows a perspective on how much budding neuroscience had developed during the nineteenth century in America. The contrast also emphasizes the complicated structure needed in both medicine and physiology to allow neurophysiology to flourish. The objectives of the American Physiological Society of 1887 were (and are) to promote physiological research and to codify physiology as a discipline. These would be accomplished by making physiology much more inclusive than traditionally accepted by raising research standards, by giving prestige to its members, by providing members a source of professional interchange, by protecting its members from antivivisectionists, and by promoting physiology as fundamental to medicine. The quantity of neuroscientific experiments by its members was striking. The main organizers of the society were Silas Weir Mitchell, John Call Dalton, Henry Pickering Bowditch, and Henry Newell Martin. The objective of the American Physiological Society of 1837 was to disperse knowledge of the “laws of life” and to promote human health and longevity. The primary organizers were William Andrus Alcott and Sylvester Graham with the encouragement of John Benson. Its technique was to use physiological information, not create it as was the case in 1887. Its object was to disseminate the word that healthy eating will improve the quality of life.     

Searching for the Material in Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

This article is a response to Peter K. Andersson’s arguments about the ‘civilizing thesis’ in Victorian Studies. It examines his approach in relation to class, discourse, and structure, particularly in relation to the working classes and future directions in approaches to nineteenth-century sources. It suggests that Victorian scholars can learn from labour geographers, who offer new models that highlight structural inequalities while maintaining a sensitivity to post-structural cultural understandings of gender, race, and class.