8:14 a.m.
Hej alla,
Varmt välkomna till nästa Zoom seminarium i seminarieserien Instructing Natural History!
Den här gången presenterar Christoffer Basse Eriksen föredraget ”Botanical Bureaucracy:
The Fall of Georg Christian Oeder and the Survival of the Flora Danica”.
Datum: 28 oktober
Tid: 15.00–16.00
Om ni vill delta, vänligen anmäl er genom att mejla oss på
instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se<mailto:instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se>, så skickar
vi en Zoom-länk.
ABSTRACT: Between 1761 and 1883 the Danish state supported the publication of 3240 tables
of indigenous Danish plants through the 51 fascicles of the Flora Danica. The history of
the Flora Danica is thus a history of continued botanical efforts and state support, but
it is also a history of dramatic changes. In this talk, I focus on one such shift, namely
the removal of the first editor, Georg Christian Oeder, following the political downfall
of Johann Friedrich Struensee. I argue that Oeder’s practice as Flora Danica editor
straddled botanical and political-economic surveying, and that his fall should not be
regarded as an exclusively political event. Next, through analysis of the bureaucracy of
the distribution of the Flora Danica fascicles, I argue that the continued survival of the
Danish national flora depended on its continued mobilisation as an instrument of
statecraft by the King and his ministers. In the talk, I use the case of Oeder’s fall and
the Flora Danica’s survival to reflect on the discontinuous nature of seemingly consistent
projects of knowledge-making.
BIO: Christoffer Basse Eriksen is associate professor of history of science at the Centre
for Science Studies, Aarhus University. Since earning his PhD in 2018, he worked as a
postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
before returning to Aarhus University in 2024. His research investigates the early uses of
the microscope in the Royal Society, the emergence of plant anatomy as a discipline, and
the territorial politics of plant images. He is currently leading the research project
“Sovereign Flowers,” which sets out to conduct the first large-scale study of the national
flora of Denmark, the Flora Danica. Christoffer is also serving as Chairperson of the
Young Academy of Denmark.
För mer information om kommande seminarier:
https://instructingnaturalhistory.com/events
Varmt välkomna!
Linda & Maria
Linda Andersson Burnett.
Wallenberg Academy Fellow
Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Science and Ideas / Inst. för idéhistoria,
Uppsala University / Uppsala universitet
https://instructingnaturalhistory.com/
https://womnh.hypotheses.org/
Latest publications / senaste publikationer:
Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial
History 1750-1820 (Yale University Press, 2025).
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264388/race-and-the-scottish-enlight…
Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett, 'Enlightenment enslavement and the
Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia,
' History Australia (2026): 1-19.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14490854.2026.2696924
Linda Andersson Burnett, Hanna Hodacs & Staffan Muller-Wille, "Writing History
into the Economy of Nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Lars Montin (1723-1783) on the
Reindeer Warble Fly," Annals of Science (2025)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00033790.2025.2514438
Linda Andersson Burnett, '"Savage" Within: The Sami People and the
Archaeology of Whiteness', Isis 116, no. 4 (2025): 766-777
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