LMU Workshop: Darwin's Creatures

LMU Workshop: Darwin's Creatures

5 December 2025, 9:00–13:00
Location: Philologicum, Multifunktionsraum

The workshop discusses Charles Darwin's literary reverberations at the intersection of comparative literature and the history of science. Focusing on Darwin's creatures, it not only asks for the cultural legacy of the zoological protagonists in his 1859 work On the Origin of Species but also inquires about the creative potential his writing opens up in Russia and Germany until the early 20th century. Presentations will offer approaches through the lenses of social history, rhetorics of science, proto-ecological thought, and literary anthropology.

Program

• 9:00 Anastassia Kostrioukova
  "Swarms of buzzing and biting mosquitoes": Populating the Feuilleton. Towards an Evolutionary Social History in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's Short Literary Forms.

• 9:45 Riccardo Nicolosi
  Darwin's Rhetoric of Science

• Coffee break

• 11:00 Philipp Kohl
  Darwin's Literary Worms in 1880s Russia

• 11:45 Jenny Willner
  "The early progenitors of man": German Afterlives of Darwin's Ancestral Speculations

• 12:30 Final discussion
  Discussant: Kärin Nickelsen