THROUGH LYELL'S EYES
THE CHARLES LYELL NETWORK AND BLOG
A space for exploration and collaboration
Our story
Story and purpose
The Sir Charles Lyell Collection at the University of Edinburgh is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections on science in the nineteenth century. Since it expanded with new acquisitions in 2019 and 2020, it offers unprecedented opportunities for insight into Lyell's life and work. You can read more about the history of the Collection, as well as access its materials, here.
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Whilst the brilliant team at the University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections catalogued and digitised the materials with the help of volunteers and interns, they kept a blog, Through Lyell's Eyes, to document the process. You can read that blog here.
This website seeks to continue the legacy of their work, keeping their values of access and collaboration central as further research is conducted within the Collection and as Lyell studies progress. It will seek to achieve this in two ways.
The first is with a new Through Lyell's Eyes blog which, with the permission of the Heritage Collections team, aims to build on the fantastic work of the previous blog. Curated and managed by Felicity MacKenzie, this new blog will provide a collaborative platform for researchers working on Lyell in any capacity. It is intended as a space for anyone who does research in the Collection and might like to share their experiences, process or findings; as well as anyone who would like to write on Lyell's life, work and world more broadly. This could be in the format of a written blog post, short podcast or interview. Felicity MacKenzie will also share any exciting finds from the Collection as she progresses through her PhD. If you would like to write/record a blog post, or have any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with Felicity via the 'Contact' page above.
The second purpose of this website is to establish the Charles Lyell Network. The Network will provide a 'directory' of sorts, in which scholars working on Lyell can become aware of each other, get in contact and collaborate. You can find more information about this on the 'Network' page above. ​
About the website curator
Felicity shares about her interest in Lyell:
'I first discovered Charles Lyell in the second year of my undergraduate degree in History at the University of Bristol. Since then, I've been hooked. I am fascinated by Lyell as a thinker, whose ideas about what science is and should be are as pertinent in contemporary Britain as they were in the nineteenth-century. Meanwhile, Lyell's character and work are full of tensions. Whilst he was a champion of education, reform and appreciating the profound beauty of the natural world; Lyell also engaged in a deeply problematic way with enslaved people in antebellum America and with attempts to justify enslavement and colonialism at home. The way in which Lyell and many of his scientific contemporaries framed their view of 'the human' was highly racialised. To this end, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the relationship between Lyell's work, scientific racism and the characterisation of Neanderthals in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
Following this, I was fortunate enough to receive full funding to pursue my MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. I spent as much of the year as possible working on Lyell, supervised by Professor James Secord. I enjoyed giving papers on Lyell at the BSHS Postgraduate Conference at the University of Oxford (2023) and later at the 'Working with Charles Lyell' Conference at the University of Edinburgh (2024).
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When I heard about the expansion of the Sir Charles Lyell Collection at the University of Edinburgh, I knew that I had to get involved in any way that I could. I'm now very grateful to be working on my PhD under the supervision of Professor Thomas Ahnert and Dr Richard Oosterhoff. My PhD focuses on tracing how Lyell's early intellectual influences and development in the 1820s impacted the rest of his life and work, with a particular focus on the influence of philosophies from the Scottish Enlightenment.
I hope this space will become a collaborative platform for others working on Lyell in any capacity. I’m always super keen to chat about all things Lyell, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Thanks very much and all best,
Felicity MacKenzie'
