Whitney Barlow Robles

Whitney Barlow Robles is a Lecturer in the Department of History and former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows (2019–2022). Her research and teaching span the history of science, environmental history, early American history, and material culture and museum studies. Her first book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (forthcoming with Yale University Press), positions animals like corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons as central protagonists of the history of eighteenth-century science. The project uses historical methods, reenactment, material culture analysis, and scientific research to show how animals facilitated and foreclosed the production of knowledge, in turn revealing the legacies of Enlightenment-era science for our own understanding of animals today. Portions of this work have received the Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences from the History of Science Society, Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize in the Natural Sciences, the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize, and Best Historical Reenactment by Bunk in their Best American History Reads of 2018. The project has been funded by the American Historical Association, the Smithsonian Institution, and the British Library, among other institutions. Her most recent publications have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, the book The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard's Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820, and Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life.