Museum Collections, Academic Teaching, and the Making of Geology in the Nineteenth-Century University

In recent years there has been a 'material turn' in the humanities and social sciences that encourages researchers to look at the roles that objects play in human action as well as signification. Many university museums have sought to exploit this shift in order to reassert the importance of their collections - and objects more broadly - as a teaching resource. This study situates such modern initiatives in a larger historical frame, exploring the origins of object-led teaching in the early nineteenth-century, when Oxford's first Reader in geology, William Buckland, routinely employed objects and illustrations in his lectures. Focusing on Buckland and his successor, John Phillips, the project draws on a wide range of evidence to analyse the ways in which they used these materials to teach and develop the science of geology.

The project is rooted in the extensive source materials in the OUMNH relating to the history of geological teaching, including collections of specimens, models and large-scale lecture diagrams as well as lecture notes, correspondence, and institutional records. This detailed work on Oxford will be contextualized through extensive comparative research on coeval developments in the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, and London, the Geological Survey's Museum of Practical Geology, and provincial museums such as that of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The project will investigate the role both of university teaching and of material and visual culture in the development of the disciplinary sciences, with a particular focus on geology. It will thus encourage a reappraisal of the approaches used in the teaching of this discipline today, including comparisons between nineteenth-century illustrative materials and modern-day digital visualisations such as virtual reality.