{"id":1689,"date":"2022-10-07T09:51:11","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T13:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/?page_id=1689"},"modified":"2022-10-07T09:53:31","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T13:53:31","slug":"friday-october-21-1100-am-jacqueline-atkin-phd-candidate-mcgill-university","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/?page_id=1689","title":{"rendered":"FRIDAY OCTOBER 21 @ 11:00 AM &#8211; JACQUELINE ATKIN, PHD CANDIDATE, MCGILL UNIVERSITY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>The universal recognizability of the human smile: <\/em><em>Strategies of photographic display in Charles Darwin\u2019s <\/em>The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)<\/p>\n<p>The subject of emotional expression was immensely popular throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.\u00a0 In his 1872 book <em>The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals<\/em>, Charles Darwin offered a controversial perspective on the topic.\u00a0 Of the various contemporary approaches to understanding expression, Darwin\u2019s was the first widely-read study to suggest that the complex human expressions traditionally believed to differentiate us from non-human animals are, in fact, proof of our descent from a common ancestor.\u00a0 While Darwin did not believe emotional expression to be exclusively human, he argued that a distinctly human state of self-awareness allows us to orient our will toward the restraint of expressive actions.\u00a0 For him, the evolution of expression in humans is best chronicled as the gradual attenuation of expressive signs.\u00a0 Through practice and repetition, he claimed, the habit of wilfully inhibiting expressions was inherited, and so became an inborn tendency distinctive of humankind.<\/p>\n<p><em>Expression <\/em>is the only book by Darwin to contain photographs.\u00a0 It was also one of the first photographically illustrated scientific books to attract a wide audience.\u00a0 The volume, which includes thirty-two photographs and twenty-one original woodcuts, was popular amongst both scientific and lay audiences.\u00a0 Given that Darwin was not a trained artist nor photographer, he was fundamentally dependent on others to illustrate <em>Expression<\/em>.\u00a0 The book reproduced pictures by five photographers, including the Scottish psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne, the London studio photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and the French neurologist Dr. Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne. \u00a0Published by John Murray shortly after <em>The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex <\/em>(1871), the well-known and controversial text in which Darwin proposed that humans share a common ancestor with apes, <em>Expression <\/em>was highly anticipated by men of science and the general public alike.\u00a0 While the premise of Darwin\u2019s theory was certainly provocative, the promise of seeing photographs likely made the book all the more popular.<\/p>\n<p>In this paper, I explore the visual strategies Darwin deployed to construct and support his argument that the universal recognizability of human expressions reveals man\u2019s connection to a primordial ancestor shared with non-human animals.\u00a0 More specifically, I examine how the presentation of photographs in <em>Expression<\/em> drew upon popular modes of nineteenth-century photographic display familiar to Darwin\u2019s Victorian readers.\u00a0 Further, I expand to consider how <em>Expression <\/em>was embedded in broader nineteenth-century debates about epistemology and scientific truth.<\/p>\n<p>Location: Zoom<\/p>\n<p>Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/yorku.zoom.us\/j\/99203776500?pwd=MXlobHlKd01Tdng4ZyttVUFVQmpBQT09\">https:\/\/yorku.zoom.us\/j\/99203776500?pwd=MXlobHlKd01Tdng4ZyttVUFVQmpBQT09<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The universal recognizability of the human smile: Strategies of photographic display in Charles Darwin\u2019s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) The subject of emotional expression was immensely popular throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.\u00a0 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29800,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29800"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1689\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/httalks.info.yorku.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}