Research & Publications
Current Projects
° Jean-Jacques Rousseau and botany: the salutary science, forthcoming monograph. This work has been funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.° Collaborative research project: 'The European appropriation of Chinese nature: transfer of botanical knowledge during the Enlightenment':My collaborator is Dr Nicolas Robin, Clusius professor at the Scaliger Institute, University of Leiden (The Netherlands), http://www.clusiusstichting.nl/Eng/chair.html, and wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter with the Institut für Biologie, Chemie, Geographie und Physik, Pädagogische Hochschule, Freiburg i. B., Germany.Our unprecedented study of early-modern European appropriations of Chinese nature and natural knowledge aims to delineate not only what kinds of natural knowledge eighteenth-century Europeans sought and obtained from China, but also to identify the resulting effects on Westerners' understanding of Chinese nature and natural knowledge. Our research illuminates an aspect of East-West relations that has received only fragmentary treatment by scholars, enabling us to see how China influenced Europe in ways that are not well-understood or well-appreciated even today.Symposium: 2009 University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts Summer Institute.Coordinators' talks at the host universities:-Dr Robin, April 2010, Centre for Humanities and Medicine, HKU, http://www.chm.hku.hk/goethe.html;-Dr Cook, October 2009, Forschungszentrum Laboratorium Aufklärung, University of Jena, Germany).My recent article, 'Linnaeus and Chinese plants: a test of the linguistic imperialism thesis', in Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2010) is closely related to this project (see below).This research collaboration has been funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).° Curator, 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la botanique', Rousseau tercentenary exhbit, May-October 2012, Conservatoire et jardin botaniques, Geneva Switzerland,
http://www.ville-ge.ch:80/culture/rousseau/programme_expositions.html
http://www.ville-ge.ch/cjb/index.php.This exhibit forms part of the city of Geneva's 2012 celebration of the tercentenary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth. My aim is to bring Rousseau the botanist alive for visitors by linking his writings to plants and their environments in an outdoor setting. We shall place special emphasis on his appreciation of nature, his application of botanical classification, his perspective on pharmaceutical botany, his interest in the Swiss flora, and his importance for botany in Geneva.
° Editor, botanical writings, in the tercentenary edition of Rousseau's Œuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, forthcoming).A selected list of my recent publications can be found below; for a more comprehensive list, please refer to the relevant sections at the top of the page.
Books in Print
- "Introduction," co-authored with Christopher Kelly, pp. i-xxviii. Compilation, translation and annotation of Rousseau's Botanical Writings. Includes "Fragments for a Dictionary of Terms of Usage in Botany," "Elementary Letters on Botany," other letters on botany, and "Fragments on Botany." In The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Vol. 8. Edited by C. Kelly. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2000 http://www.upne.com/1-58465
-007-9.html Articles
- "Linnaeus and Chinese plants: a test of the linguistic imperialism thesis", Notes and Records of The Royal Society (published online 23 September 2009) 64, no. 2 (2010): 121-38. (Editorial) (PDF File)
- "Idées et pratiques scientifiques dans la correspondance botanique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau", Annales de la société(October 2008): 265-85. (PDF file)
- "The Septième Promenade of the Rêveries: A Peculiar Account of Rousseau's Botany?" In J.O'Neal, ed., The Nature of Rousseau's Reveries, special volume of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (2008). SVEC 2008 (PDF file) SVEC 2008 Appendix (PDF file)
- "Botanical Exchanges: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Duchess of Portland." History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 142-56.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2006.08.010
- "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Anticipation of Humboldt's Plant Geography," Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos. Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, City University of New York. http://web.gc.cuny.edu/bildnercenter/publications/humboldt.pdf
- "Rousseau and the Languages of Music and Botany," in Musique et langage chez Rousseau, C. Dauphin, ed. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 8 (2004): 75-87. Rousseau and the Languages of Music and Botany (PDF file) http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/catalogue/cat_index.ssi
- "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les réseaux d'échange botanique," in B. Bensaude-Vincent, ed. Rousseau et les sciences. Lharmattan, 2003. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les réseaux d'échange botanique (PDF file) http://www.editions-harmattan
.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue &obj=result
- "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's copy of Albrecht von Haller's Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoate (1768). Archives of Natural History 30/1 (2003): 149-156. ANH article (PDF file) http://www.shnh.org/PUB
_mainpage.html
- "Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Exotic Botany," in Eighteenth-Century Life special issue, Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration, R. Maccubbin and C. Knellwolf, eds. 26/3 (Fall 2002): 181-201. Rousseau and Exotic Botany (PDF file) http://ecl.dukejournals.org/