VISAWUS 2022-23 Zoom Series
Victorian Promises: The Promise of the Cosmos
Friday, January 27, 2023 at 11:00am Pacific Time
This panel explores fundamental questions of what the world beyond the earth—taken broadly to mean the Sun, planets and satellites of the solar system, as well as the distant stars and nebulae beyond the solar system—enabled Victorian artists, scientists, or historians to think about, know, and imagine. What styles and rhetorics developed around how the Victorians discussed, represented, and studied the world outside of earth, including the sublime and also transcending it?
Presenters
Robert Smith, University of Alberta
“An Astronomical Promise: The Planet Neptune and the Greatest Discovery of Nineteenth Century Science”
Anne Sullivan, University of California, Riverside
“‘A power beyond even that of sight’: John Herschel and the Promise of Astrophotography”
Neil Hultgren, California State University, Long Beach
“William Hope Hodgson’s Dark Nebula, or, Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”