Julia Voss: Darwin’s Pictures

Icons of Evolution in the 19th Century

Charles Darwin had a lifelong interest in pictorial representations of natural history. He sketched out his evolutionary theory and related ideas over a period lasting more than forty years. The lecture offers a tour through Darwin’s picture archives and shows that each of his images characterizes a different aspect of his relationship with visual information. The lecture argues that he was thinking with the eyes and that his pictorial representations and the popularization of the theory of evolution were vitally interconnected.

Julia Voss, born 1974 in Frankfurt, Germany, works as an editor of the arts department at FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). In 2009 she was awarded the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.

Key publications: Darwin’s Pictures. Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837-1874, Yale University Press, New Haven 2010 (deutsch: Darwins Bilder. Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie, 1837-1874, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007); Darwins Jim Knopf, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009; Charles Darwin. Das Lesebuch, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008; Charles Darwin zur Einführung, Junius Verlag, Hamburg 2008.

The lecture series 2011/2012 addresses the question: Is there architecture history after Foucault? The IKA invites historians, scientists and architecture theorists from various fields and disciplines to discuss more fundamental issues of the practices of a historian which are diversely effected by the major impact of Michel Foucault’s writings. However, the main focus of the lectures is rather generally on methodo-logical approaches of subsequent historical research and knowledge. The lectures will help to redefine architecture history’s position today.