"Dead Museum Animals: Natural Order or Cultural Chaos?"

Libby Robin discusses animals in museums, and how taxidermy has changed from art in the service of science to the backbone of art itself, both in museums and beyond.

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"Weird and Wonderful: The First Objects of the National Historical Collection"

Libby Robin discusses the implication of Sir Colin MacKenzie’s initiative to collect Australian marsupials.

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"Uncharismatic Invasives"

Looking at the case of organisms attached to tsunami debris rafting across the Pacific to Oregon, Jonathan L. Clark examines how invasive species managers think about the moral status of the animals they seek to manage.

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“The Love of the Chase Is an Inherent Delight in Man”: Hunting and Masculine Emotions in the Victorian Zoologist’s Travel Memoir

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Perspectives Issue 2017/4

Through a reading of two Victorian travel memoirs, Will Abberley demonstrates the contradictions in Victorian attitudes towards masculinity, nature, and emotions.

The Domestic Stain, or Maintaining Standards

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Perspectives Issue 2017/1

Harriet Ritvo’s article complicates the categorical separation of “wild” and “domesticated” that has organized much Western thought on species distinctions. Ritvo invites us to think beyond the boundaries and fixedness of dominant concepts.

The zoological collections of the Port Essington Expedition

In this chapter of the virtual exhibition “Ludwig Leichhardt: A German Explorer’s Letters Home from Australia,” cultural studies researcher Heike Hartmann presents the deeds, fate, and legacy of Dr. Leichhardt’s companion John Gilbert.

Ludwig Leichhardt: A German Explorer’s Letters Home from Australia

Seventeen letters sent by Ludwig Leichhardt from 1842–48 vividly depict his stay in Australia. In this exhibition curated by historian Heike Hartmann, we are introducing a brand new English translation of the letters and a timeline tool with which to view those, this virtual exhibition documents Leichhardt’s adventurous stay in Australia and opens up new perspectives for the environmental history of the land, Europeans’ engagement with its indigenous population, and international scientific networks at the time.

Heike Hartmann

About the author

Hartmann, Heike

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Germany

Heike Hartmann is a museum curator and researcher in the field of cultural studies with a focus on visual culture, postcolonial criticism, and the transcultural history of science and archives. She was a member of the ATN-DAAD research project “Leichhardt’s Legacies: Locating the Disappeared,” curator of the exhibition “‘Gut möglich, dass meine Knochen für immer auf den Ebenen dieser Kolonie bleichen werden’: Der Australienforscher Ludwig Leichhardt” (Marstall Schloss Branitz, Cottbus, 2013), and editor of the accompanying volume Ludwig Leichhardt: Spuren eines Verschollenen.

Heike Hartmann is currently curating an exhibition on German colonialism at Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. She has contributed to a number of exhibitions, including Bilder verkehren: Postkarten in der visuellen Kultur des deutschen Kolonialismus (2005) and Karl May—Imaginary Journeys (2007), and she is coeditor of the volume Menschen—Orte—Zeiten: Fotografie am Deutschen Historischen Museum (2009).