On Wonder: Literature, Science, and the Long Eighteenth Century (under contract with Cambridge University Press) turns to the unexplained, the mysterious, and the odd. I argue that such traces of unknowability are central to the production of Enlightenment epistemology: the strange and peculiar function as occasions for wonder, which is simultaneously affective (as astonishment) and epistemological (as curiosity). My goal in On Wonder is to show that our story of the period’s major intellectual transformation, in which received (textual, Aristotelian) knowledge came to be displaced by discovered (empirical, Baconian) knowledge, does not account for the ubiquity and influence of wonder. Instead, this gradual, fitful movement from received to discovered knowledge produces wonder that ultimately transforms seemingly ordinary things into rarities.
I tell this story through encounters with the works of Robert Boyle, René Descartes, Adam Smith, Sara Ahmed, and Katherine McKittrick; tales of wonder about, for instance, a groaning tree, self-amputating legs, a bleeding moon, and 140 year-olds in ephemeral pamphlets as well as the Philosophical Transactions and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789); scientific instruments designed to cultivate wonder, particularly the magic lantern; and myriad literary texts by Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Carter, John Gay, James Thomson, and Olaudah Equiano in which intimacies of wonder reveal and enable forms of knowing that make way for the epistemological and political possibilities of difference.
at the Folger Institute (Washington DC)
The Dibner Lecture in the History and Culture of Science at the Huntington Library (Pasadena, CA)
The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
