The Art and Visual Politics of the Tichborne Claimant Case in Victorian London Jennifer Tucker

The Art and Visual Politics of the Tichborne Claimant Case in Victorian London

Jennifer Tucker
Associate Professor of History, Science & Society, and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Wesleyan University

Thursday, March 17, 2011
4:30 p.m., King 323

My paper “The Art and Visual Politics of the Tichborne Claimant Case in Victorian London” is part of a longer study I am completing about the history of visual evidence, legal testimony, and the formation of public opinion about contested identities in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on examples from hundreds of photographs, engravings, and other visual materials that circulated around the time of the high-profile trial, I plan to discuss how the physical movement of photographs and other visual materials through time and space shaped the meaning of the case from the beginning. The case offers revealing clues to mid-nineteenth century attitudes both about photographs as documentary evidence and about the law as a photographic arena in the years before the Bertillon method and other visual forensic techniques were introduced.

Jennifer Tucker received her BA in Human Biology (Neuropsychology of Vision, Perception, and Memory) from Stanford University, her master’s in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and her Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University. She currently is Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan University and a member of the core faculty of the Science in Society Program and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (Chair, 2008-2009). Her research interests include the history of science and technology, Victorian visual culture, photographic truth and evidence, early science film history and spectatorship, gender and science, and the links between art and the popularization of science in the British Empire. She is the author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Johns Hopkins University, 2005) and the editor of a recent special theme issue of History and Theory on “Photography and Historical Interpretation” (Dec. 2009). She has published on scientific ballooning, visual history and the archive, photographic evidence in Victorian law, and the relationship between gender and genre in nineteenth-century European scientific illustration. Her research and teaching have been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Carol A. Baker Memorial Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Teaching and Research, Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies Grant, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Summer Research Stipend, Clark Art Institute Visiting Research Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation Grant, Johns Hopkins University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a British Marshall Scholarship. In 2009-2010, she was in residence as a Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professor of History and Science/Technology Studies at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Recent events she has organized include “Eye of History: The Camera as Witness” and “Science a Moving Image”. Her current project, “The Art and Visual Politics of the Tichborne Claimant Affair,” excavates hundreds of photographs, engravings, and other visual materials that circulated around the time of the high-profile trial in order to show how the physical movement of photographs and other visual materials through time and space shaped the meaning of the case from the beginning. The case offers revealing clues to mid-nineteenth century attitudes both about photographs as documentary evidence and about the law as a photographic arena in the years before the Bertillon method and other visual forensic techniques were introduced. She is also conducting research on the significance of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1850 to 1930 in the history of photography and cinema, particularly documentary film.