Daniel Williams
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Daniel Williams
@dbenjw.bsky.social
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Asst. Prof. of Literature at Bard College • fmr Harvard Society of Fellows • Victorian & South African Literature, Env. Humanities • THE ART OF UNCERTAINTY (Cambridge, 2024) • doi.org/10.1017/9781009436120 • www.danielbenjaminwilliams.com
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dbenjw.bsky.social
“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC!

I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️

doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
Screenshot of article abstract. Text: Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms. Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background. Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left. Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.
October 12, 2025 at 7:26 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
🌊 Please read Lindsay Wilhelm's marvelous state-of-the-field essay on the ✨ VICTORIAN PACIFIC ✨, out now in Literature Compass!!!

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
ABSTRACT: Despite (or perhaps because of) its distance from Britain, the Pacific islands occupied complicated symbolic and material terrain in Victorian culture. Home to major settler populations in New Zealand and Australia, the Pacific was also an exotic tourist destination, the setting for popular adventure novels and travelogues, a field laboratory for the burgeoning disciplines of ethnography, biology, and race science, and one of the last battlegrounds in the global scrabble for resources. This essay surveys the small but rich body of scholarship that has emerged over the past 30 years to elucidate Victorians' engagements with the Pacific. In particular, this essay highlights the unique challenges and opportunities posed by its study: attending to the Pacific requires us to rethink our terminology, expand our archives, refine our methods, and interrogate our approach to Indigeneity. As such, a survey of scholarship on this still somewhat marginal subject offers insights into the state of Victorian studies more broadly, at a juncture in which the field is reorienting itself toward the global.
June 30, 2025 at 6:37 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
6th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥! Please share/RT!

If you have a paper that fits the bill, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945,” do consider submitting!

Deadline: Jan. 31, 2025
Award: $250
The Vcologies Working Group announces the 2025 Early Career Paper Prize. The prize recognizes work by rising scholars that exemplifies the Vcologies effort to consider ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945. Early career scholars working in any field are eligible. Graduate students and contingently employed colleagues are especially encouraged to submit. "Early career" is defined as a scholar of any rank or affiliation who is working toward a PhD, or who has received the PhD in the past three calendar years (2021 or later). PhDs from 2020 are also eligible to apply in cases where parental duties or medical leave have affected research. The winning paper will be selected according to three criteria: (1) Potential significance for Victorian studies and its relation to the study of ecology, broadly construed; (2) Quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; (3) Clarity and effectiveness of presentation. Papers will be anonymized before being forwarded to three judges. The prize award is $250 Submission Guidelines The prize is open to papers of no more than 3,500 words (not including notes, image captions, or references) written by early career scholars. Please submit papers in MS Word or PDF (with no identifying information on the document itself), along with (as a separate document) a cover sheet stating (1) your name, (2) year of Ph.D. (or year expected), (3) name of your degree-granting institution, (4) title of your essay, and (5) contact information, to Kathleen Frederickson at kfrederickson@ucdavis.edu. Submission deadline is January 31, 2025.
January 8, 2025 at 3:26 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
🌞A good day to contemplate Larkin’s quirky but moving poem, “Solar”:

“Single stalkless flower / You pour unrecompensed”🌞
April 8, 2024 at 12:20 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
And I argue that reading for uncertainty in this way yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting in the Victorian novel, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, + a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended.

cambridge.org/9781009436113
March 6, 2024 at 5:50 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, Victorian novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition + participated in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numbers

cambridge.org/9781009436113
March 6, 2024 at 5:49 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
🌞The Art of Uncertainty🌞 shows how Victorian novelists—Eliot, Collins, Thackeray, Hardy, and later Conrad—drew on science, math, philosophy, and the law to develop unique forms of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty.

cambridge.org/9781009436113: 20% off w/ TAU2024
March 6, 2024 at 5:47 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
✨The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel✨ is out with Cambridge UP!

Available in US/UK (cambridge.org/9781009436113), 20% off w/ TAU2024

Huge thanks to all who shepherded it into print and to Kate Flint & Clare Pettitt for including it in their series!
March 6, 2024 at 5:46 PM
dbenjw.bsky.social
5th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥 is open! Please share/RT!

Wider remit than before, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945”…

Consider submitting a paper by Jan. 31, 2024, for $250!
October 16, 2023 at 2:43 PM