Dissecting Blackness: new sources on the racial science of Abraham Bäck, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, and Carl Linnaeus
In February 1744, the Swedish physician Abraham Bäck (1713–95), better known as Carl Linnaeus’s best friend, dissected the body of an unknown Black man who had recently died at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris. Black cadavers were rare in eighteenth century Europe and opportunities to dissect them were few, especially for an anatomist from Sweden, a country which did not have colonial possessions from 1663 to 1784. Based on untapped archival materials, this talk will explore Bäck’s little known research on Blackness. It will reveal previously unknown working relations between Bäck, the German-born Dutch anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and Linnaeus, and more broadly investigate the possible role played by Bäck’s research on Black bodies in the development of Linnaeus’s own corpus on human taxonomy and human types.
Dr Vincent Roy-Di Piazza is a historian of early modern science, religion, and medicine. He holds a doctorate in history of science, medicine, economic and social history from the University of Oxford, and is currently a Postdoctoral Hagströmer Fellow at the Karolinska Institute. Follow his research at www.roydipiazza.com
Ancients, Moderns, and Americans: The Battle over Classical Education in the Early Republic
American classicists and historians alike have long been infatuated with the supposed inspiration the “founding fathers” drew from antiquity. Largely relying on anecdotal accounts, such inquiries have eschewed attention to the actual practices of education, preferring instead to project onto the early American past a portrait of uncontested appreciation for the classics. By diving into the archival records of classical learning, this talk presents a far different image of the particular place and purpose Latin and Greek learning could be put towards in the new American nation.
Dickinson College, founded just one week after the American Revolution, was during its first decades perhaps the most pro-classics and yet anti-North American institution of any college up unto that point. Charles Nisbet, the leader of the new college and recent emigrant from Scotland, morphed the college curriculum into an all-out culture war between the ancients and moderns, reigniting that battle of the books that had been waged across England and France throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Students left Dickinson acutely aware of the controversy that has long defined Latin and Greek learning and typified America’s love-hate relationship with the classics.
Theodore (Teddy) R. Delwiche is a PhD candidate at Yale University whose research interests lie at the intersection of early modern European intellectual history, colonial America, and classical reception studies. He will shortly be defending his dissertation “The Contested Classics: Education in Early North America, 1630-1830” and in the spring of 2024 begin a post-doc position at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Teddy is the author of a dozen peer-reviewed articles on, among other topics, the republic of letters in early America, the cultures and practices of shorthand notetaking in colonial New England, and student societies at early American colleges. Currently, he is preparing an article on the indigenous history of classical education in Native New England.