Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture from 1850 to the Present

Encountering dinosaurs is a routine experience for most of us. They tower over us in museums, entertain us in books and films, and peer out at us from our cereal boxes. Though increasingly well-understood from a scientific standpoint, dinosaurs are far less frequently considered by cultural historians: it may be enough for some people to understand how these animals lived (and died), but the reasons such understandings have become important in twenty-first century culture are in themselves worthy of investigation. What is it about dinosaurs that makes them so appealing? Why do we use them to tell stories to each other, and how do those stories work? Most importantly of all, how have those stories evolved since dinosaurs were first discovered, and what can their evolution teach us about the broader relationships between science and culture?
Dinosaurs are both a manifestation of and an ideal lens through which to view the apparent rift between literature and science which C. P. Snow infamously called 'The Two-Culture Divide' in 1959. Their very existence serves to demonstrate the interdependence of these disciplines: painstakingly reconstructed from scant fossil remains, dinosaurs are invariably the product of imaginative faculties as well as empirical data. They therefore embody a combination of storytelling and science; they are, so to speak, inherently interdisciplinary. By understanding dinosaurs as a focal point for the shifting conversations between literature and science over the last 160 years, this study therefore speaks to wider questions of interdisciplinary knowledge as well as to the specifics of our relationships with Mesozoic life.
This project will examine the ways in which dinosaurs are narrated to and by the public in the broadest possible sense. The materials of its study range from scientific documents written during the nineteenth century (such as the treatise in which Richard Owen coined the word 'dinosaur' in 1842) to contemporary science fiction (such as Stephen Baxter's 2002 novel Evolution). These categories are frequently less distinct than we might suppose - the 1995 novel Raptor Red, for instance, was written by acclaimed palaeontologist Robert T. Bakker explicitly to capitalise on his science's dramatic potential. It seems that dinosaurs often serve to collapse the spatial distances between kinds of writing, as well as the temporal distances between ancient animals, Victorian naturalists, and present-day consumers.
Dinosaurs do this kind of work beyond, as well as within, printed texts, so the Fellowship also takes account of the importance of institutions as sources of popular knowledge. Museums have always played a central role in the way dinosaurs are seen, and this importance is reflected in the RA's research focus. Key to the project is its partnership with the Lapworth Museum of Geology, a Victorian institution newly refurbished for the twenty-first century, located on UoB's main Edgbaston campus and recently nominated for the Art Fund's 2016 Museum of the Year award. By the time the Fellowship begins, Dr Tattersdill will already have collaborated with the Lapworth on a public exhibition about dinosaur images; working further with the museum, its staff, and its extensive archive will give Dr Tattersdill and the RA privileged access to both a source of valuable information about the past and an exciting means of engaging the wider, present-day public in their research.
During the Fellowship, Dr Tattersdill will consolidate his growing reputation as a research leader - not only in the studies which form the centrepiece of the project but in a two-day workshop which will benefit academics working in cognate areas and in a series of events designed to engage specialist educators and the general public. Through mentoring the RA and through teaching and impact activities associated with the project, he will also gain significant experience of collaboration, admin, and knowledge transfer.

Beyond the academy, this project is designed to engage two groups in particular. The first is museum and education professionals, including community volunteers, who will be included in the project via a bespoke workshop and the creation of a teaching resource; the second is the general public, who will be engaged with via several different events designed to capture a range of audiences (a public lecture, a children's poetry workshop, and a movie night). In both cases, the Fellowship's events are envisaged as having at least as great an impact on the researchers as on their audiences: this project is fundamentally about public perceptions of dinosaurs, and exposure to a range of those perceptions will only enrich the academic work around which the project is focussed.
Taking place at the midpoint of the project, the workshop for museum and education professionals will be conducted at and with the assistance of Birmingham's thinktank museum. With the PI as facilitator, this workshop will provide a space for a diverse group of experts to exchange thoughts and current techniques regarding the role of dinosaurs in education, potentially inspiring new collaborations between the heritage, secondary, and higher education sectors. Its principal object, though, will be to encourage individual reflection on the role played by dinosaurs in today's teaching cultures. The workshop will benefit PI and RA by exposing them to current school and museum approaches to the subject; they aim, in turn, to change the way that these approaches are conceived and conducted, giving educators more tools with which to think through the pedagogies of the prehistoric. The involvement of thinktank extends the Fellowship's contact with the museum sector beyond the Lapworth, taking the project off campus and into the heart of the city.
The workshop will also feed the development of a teaching resource that the PI and RA will create in close collaboration with the Lapworth. Dinosaurs have recently been added to the Key Stage 2 curriculum and the Lapworth museum is already hosting school parties whose instructors would benefit from a set of suggested activities for before, during, and after visits. Creating the teaching resource will not only have a positive impact on local schools and the Lapworth museum, but will also give the PI and RA a new kind of contact with some of their main research questions, including a sharpened insight into the way dinosaurs are figured legally (ie. on a national curriculum, as a compulsory part of childhood).
Amongst the wider public, the Fellowship will seek to provoke thought and enhance knowledge about its subject with a small but diverse series of activities. The lecture, as the most summative performance of the Fellowship's research, is situated at its close; evenly spaced throughout the duration of the Fellowship, the other two events provide an opportunity for the PI and RA to be informed by public perspectives on their work. The film night provides an ideal means of engagement through the dinosaurs' rich screen history, and will give the PI an opportunity to converse with film buffs as well as cinema staff on the nature of this enduring association. The children's poetry workshop, capitalising upon an existing collaboration between the PI and the Emma Press, allows children to inform the project directly without excerpting them from a space - the Lapworth Museum - which has considerable experience entertaining them. In all three events, it is anticipated that framing dinosaurs through the lens of literary criticism will encourage attendees to consider more broadly the interactions between literature and science which feed public conversation. By placing literary criticism in spaces and contexts normally seen as 'scientific', each event serves to promote the value of the Arts and Humanities in wider culture.