This award will support work to research, edit, and publish all the letters to and from Darwin in the crucial years 1871 to 1873 when Darwin was producing his books On the Descent of Man and On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This period was one of the most significant in Darwin's life, and one of the most controversial. This award will enable the PI to foster young scholars in the history of science who will actively contribute to the award-winning series of publications The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. It also serves to establish significant international collaboration between Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, UK, bringing together expertise on Charles Darwin and the human sciences, and drawing widely on scholarship in the two universities. The project will be supported in large part by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, by way of an International Initiative between AHRC and NSF.
The research aim is to explore the theories and evidence underlying Darwin's pioneering proposals about the biological nature of humankind. This will be achieved by publishing all Darwin's known correspondence in the period (consisting of about 2000 letters) and by providing scholarly notes that explain the content along with copious additional interpretative material. The goal of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin is to make this remarkable archival material accessible both in print and online to a wide audience. Previous volumes in the series have won praise for the excellence of its editorial procedures and the accessibility of its research findings. Young scholars will join a noted international team and receive one of the most highly valued trainings in editorial methods currently available in the historical sciences. Even though a number of scholarly and popular accounts have already addressed several of these questions, only a small proportion of the full range of documents in Darwin's archive have been readily available. This project will transform understanding of Darwin's theories about humankind and provide free access to fundamental original documents to readers across the globe.
This major three-year transatlantic collaboration between the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge and a specially established research group at Harvard University, focussed on Charles Darwin’s correspondence about theories of human origins, and has explored the wide-ranging and controversial work of Darwin and his contemporaries in developing an evolutionary theory of human nature in the period 1870 to 1873. These were the crucial years that saw the publication of Darwin's long anticipated books, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Darwin’s correspondence from this period is of fundamental importance in understanding both the development of his theory of human origins, and its relationship to prevailing assumptions about human nature. Evolutionary controversies of the nineteenth century continue to be at the centre of public debate today, all around the world. The research undertaken for this award has a profound impact on the public understanding of science as a cooperative, collaborative, and open-minded, enterprise involving men and women from different backgrounds. Correspondence provides a model in which relations between different cultural and religious groups can be seen in terms of exchange and interaction, rather than as confrontation. The most important outcome of the project is the publication of three volumes of the award-winning edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Burkhardt et al. Cambridge University Press, vols. 18-20), covering the years 1870 to 1872, with a fourth volume (vol. 21, covering 1873) delivered to press in May 2013. These four volumes contain the complete texts of 2377 letters, representing all known suriving letters that Darwin either wrote or received in those years, together with biographical details of every person mentioned, bibliographic details of every publication mentioned, and explanatory notes that make the wide-ranging content readily accessible. Letters played a central role in Darwin's research in this period as he expanded his network of correspondents in order to gather information on human behavior and sexual selection across the globe. Letters also played a crucial part in, and now provide a record of, Darwin’s discussion of the implications of his theory for the origins of language and emotional expression, the operation of the moral sense, and the progress of human civilization with scientists, clergymen, philosophers, and other members of the reading public. A major element of this international award was the establishment of a mentoring programme through which early career researchers could be trained in the skills of teamwork and careful scholarship essential to modern research in both the humanities and the sciences. Four out of a team of six US-based research assistants spent periods working alongside the UK team as well as collaborating remotely in research, in the creation of web-based educational resources, and in the preparation of texts for publication. Researchers presented their findings at conferences around the world and the Darwin Correspondence Project organised or co-sponsored three conferences: one on the broad cross-disciplinary theme of Darwin and Human Nature; one with the Royal Society, exploring the life and work of the Darwin collaborator, evolutionist and anthropologist, John Lubbock; one with the Digital History and Philosophy of Science Consortium on the techniques and challenges of making material such as Darwin's correspondence accessible and available in the long term. The international conference on Darwin and Human Nature invited scholars in history, history of science, philosophy, English literature, and gender studies to reflect on the legacy of Darwinian frameworks of the 'human' today, while other collaborations have linked Darwin's work on emotional expression to current research in neuroscience, autism, and the development of artificial intelligence. The award has supported the creation of web resources to make the texts of Darwin's letters and associated contextual material, more accessible to a wider audience, and to make the most important letters available in advance of print publication (www.darwinproject.ac.uk/). A total of 7537 letter texts are now available online with unrestricted access. Resources include selected letters on the themes of ethics, progress, language, and emotion. Key letters are arranged with explanatory and visual material, and with suggestions for further reading to aid in both formal and independent study. Other aspects of Darwin's research on human nature have received special attention on the website: his observations of children, his global survey of emotional expression, and his experiment on emotional recognition. More detailed studies of Darwin's research on human emotions and expression allows users to see how the science of human nature was actually practised in Darwin's day. The resources are of proven interest to the general public and of proven value in secondary education across the curriculum. The Project website now contains downloadable subject packs for 11 to 16 year-olds in English, History, Science, and Religious Education, with cross-curricular material on Darwin's Beagle voyage, Darwin and slavery, and his network of women correspondents (www.darwinproject.ac.uk/schools-resources).
