Emily Hutcheson

(Residential Fellow, 2019-20)

Emily Hutcheson

Residential Fellow

The Living Sea: Marine Algae, Symbiosis, Coral Reefs and Transnational Science 1880-1930
Video: Lecture, Oct. 11, 2019

Emily Hutcheson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in History of Science. She holds an MA in History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MA in History and Philosophy of Science from Florida State University and a BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University.

Her dissertation on the history of coral reef science traces how reefs came to be seen as living communities between 1880 and 1930, through the work of a self-organized network of scientists. At the Linda Hall Library, she will study the collection of Siboga monographs, a series of expedition reports that describe the physical collections from the Dutch oceanographic expedition aboard the HM Siboga (1899-1900) in present-day Indonesia. This expedition focused extensively on collecting flora and fauna from coral reefs and was novel in its official inclusion of a woman scientist, Anna Weber-van Bosse. Through investigating the network of scientists involved in analyzing the Siboga expedition’s results, this research will illuminate the contributions of botanists and women scientists in the intellectual history of coral reefs. In addition, this project will connect with larger questions in the history of science including how knowledge circulates and who contributes to knowledge creation.