As a curator, in museum Beelden aan Zee, I exhibited the Gorille enlevant une Femme, by Emmanuel Fremiet dated 1887, in an exhibition of French and Belgian animal sculptors in 2011. The... Show moreAs a curator, in museum Beelden aan Zee, I exhibited the Gorille enlevant une Femme, by Emmanuel Fremiet dated 1887, in an exhibition of French and Belgian animal sculptors in 2011. The confrontation with, and my great surprise about this sculpture (a gorilla abducting a woman) led to this research. Just imagine: you walk into a living room in an appartment on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris around 1890, and on a side table, one discovers a bronze sculpture: a gorilla abducting a woman. Such a sculpture does not suit our sense of taste. I suspected that this sculpture would represent more than just 'a curious piece of kitsch'. The resulting research in my dissertation led to many things: it turned out that the artist was world-famous in his time, it turned out that the gorilla had only been discovered in 1847, and it turned out that a few more gorilla sculptures had been made by Fremiet, the first as early as 1859. Furthermore, I discuss the entrance of the gorilla into zoology, the theme of the abduction of women in art and the use of the image for nationalistic and anti-Semitic purposes. The relevance of this research lies in the use of all kinds of other disciplines, which results in a new art-historical image of nineteenth century art and sculpture. The study also addresses nineteenth century issues: colonialism, the poor position of women, antisemitism, nationalism and our relationship to the animal kingdom are related to technical and iconographical interpretations of the Fremiet gorillas. Show less
In the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study Mooiman argues that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi... Show moreIn the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study Mooiman argues that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi-autonomous skill or art form, but as an aspect of music-making in general. With this research, Mooiman offers a ‘panorama’ of nineteenth-century styles and situations of music-making that together sketch a picture of improvisatory aspects of nineteenth-century music. Music was generally experienced as a wordless language, and he argues that making music was understood as a rhetorical act: performers strove for musical persuasion. This study focuses on the performer: it explores how performers in the nineteenth century might have thought during the real-time act of music-making, and how performers today might learn to use musical languages from the past actively again. For this last aspect, the area of music theory is relevant; Mooiman concludes his dissertation with a discussion of how traditional music theory is challenged by improvisatory music-making. Show less
While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the northern states and Canada through the “Underground Railroad”,... Show moreWhile the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the northern states and Canada through the “Underground Railroad”, Conditional Freedom aims to provide new insights into the evolving social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America, particularly by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the US South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the US-Mexican borderlands. First, Conditional Freedom provides a social history of enslaved freedom-seekers. Second, it also provides a political history of the contest between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi river valley between 1803 and 1861. Its main question is: what was the nature of slave flight in the Mexican borderlands, and how and why did Mexico develop into a site of “conditional freedom” for slave refugees from the American South? In order to reconstruct the entangled stories of slave refugees and free soil in the US-Mexico borderlands, this study draws mostly upon municipal, county and state archives, military and judicial records, diplomatic and personal correspondence, newspaper articles, “runaway slave” advertisements, petitions, memoirs and travel accounts. Show less
“Temminck’s Order” is the scientific biography of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1850), a Dutch naturalist and the first director of ’s Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden. It embeds... Show more“Temminck’s Order” is the scientific biography of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1850), a Dutch naturalist and the first director of ’s Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden. It embeds Temminck’s career in the context of the development of nineteenth-century zoological classification, which has been explored only partially. Addressing this historiographic silence, this book examines, among other things, Temminck’s law on the geographical distribution of animals, his classification systems, his definitions of type and genus, and his debates with fellow naturalists. From this study, three main issues emerge as the most relevant at that time: the development of systematics as a discipline, the rise of a meritocracy in natural history and the status of systematics within natural history and natural philosophy. “Temminck’s Order” provides a more detailed view of the complex history of zoological classification, with the conclusion that systematics came of age between 1800 and 1850. Show less
