Nickle at Noon – Maria Zytaruk: Artifacts of Biodiversity

Maria Zytaruk, Associate Professor of English, is Principal Investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant-funded project, Seeds for Tomorrow: A Material History of Eighteenth-Century Seed Exchange and Seed Collections. She is author of Nature on the Page: The Print and Manuscript Culture of Victorian Natural History (Coach House Press, 2019). Her curatorial work includes exhibitions at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and at the TFDL’s Special Collections. In 2016, she produced the CBC Ideas documentary Seed Banks (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/seed-banks-re-sowing-paradise-1.3898130).

Her talk explores natural history specimens held in museums and archives, and the ways in which such objects are resonant artifacts of lost and declining biodiversity.

Mounted Herbarium specimen in copy of Systematic Arrangement of British Plants (1835).

Natural Illustration from David Landsborough’s Treasures of the Deep (1847).

Eighteenth-Century Seed Packet, Linnean Society of London.