In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly, and Popular Practice (Sinergia)

Past Events

Concluding Apéro and Online-Exhibit Vernissage, Shadow of the Tree
Zurich,  Sphères Café (Hardturmstrasse 66)
January 10, 2024, 19:00

Colloquium Talk, Claude-Olivier Doron (Paris Diderot), "'From the point of view of the diversity of races'. French liberalism and the birth of racial science (1817-1848)"
University of Lucerne, 3.B57
November 24, 2023, 14:15

Public Lecture, Maaike van der Lugt (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), "The difficult birth of the concept of hereditary disease in medieval medicine"
Universität Zürich, KOL-H-321
16:15, December 15, 2022

Project Workshop 6
University of Cambridge
September 12-14, 2022

International Conference 2(Program)
Universität Zürich
March 14-15, 2022

Colloquium Talk, Petter Hellström (Uppsala), "The Family Tree: A History of Scientific Imagination"
University of Lucerne via Zoom
Feb. 22, 2022

Public Lecture, Petter Hellström (Uppsala), "Trees of Knowledge: Science and the Shape of Genealogy"
Universität Luzern, Room 3.A05
16:00, November 5, 2021

Project Workshop 5
Universität Luzern
November 4-5, 2021

Lecture Yulia Egorova (Durham), "Sovereignty, Genomics and Diaspora: Alternative Genealogies and DNA Research on Jewish Populations"
Univ. of Zurich (via Zoom Registration)
April 12, 2021, 17:00 s.t.

Project Workshop 4
Universität Zürich
April 12-13, 2021

History of the Human Sciences Special Issue Authors' Workshop
UniLU (via Zoom)
October 29-30, 2020

Lecture Olivier Doron (Paris), "Race, Genealogy, and Degeneration"
Kulturwiss. Kolloquium, UniLU (via Zoom)
October 16, 2020, 14:15-16:00

Project Workshop 3
Universität Basel
September 28-29, 2020

Workshop Relationen erfassen. Zur Epistemologie des Diagramms with Charlotte Bigg (Centre Alexandre-Koyré, Paris)
May 6, 2020

Conference 1
April 2-3, 2020 (canceled)

Project Workshop 2
Institut für Medizin und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Universität zu Lübeck
Guests: Cornelius Borck (Lübeck), Markus Friedrich (Hamburg), Elisabeth Timm (Münster)
October 28-29, 2019

Project Kickoff Workshop
Universität Luzern
April 5-6, 2019

Michael Günzburger, Baum. 2007. Graphit auf Papier, 57 x 77 cm

SNF Sinergia Project with four research groups: Profs. Marianne Sommer (University of Lucerne), Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter and Lübeck), Caroline Arni (University of Basel).

Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation from February 2019 to January 2024.

‘In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly, and Popular Practice’ is an interdisciplinary collaboration of four research groups investigating the bewildering variety of diagrams that have been used to conceptualize, determine, and produce relatedness in Western Europe and in spaces of European expansion since the Late Medieval Period. Work on the ‘tree of life’ has brought to light unexpected evolutionary affinities, and the possibility to study the genetic make-up of human populations as well as to identify the place of individual human DNA within ‘the human family tree’ has impacted our understandings of relatedness. In parallel, new digital methods to visualize such relations have proliferated. Drawing on a long cultural and scientific history, such visualizations tend to take the form of a tree, reflecting the assumption that evolution and descent follow a bifurcating pattern. ‘Tree thinking’ has therefore been identified as a dominant mode of thought and the tree as a canonical icon in modern biology. Indeed, tree thinking has been made out as a general modern Western rationale that reduces relatedness to descent. Rather than tracing the history of a particular idea or icon, however, we offer a comparative analysis of diagrams of relatedness as epistemic, cultural, and political practices. The project introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to diagrammatics that analyzes diagrams as techniques that transcend such binaries as ‘thought and action’ and ‘image and text’ and includes the reconstruction of the practices of collection, observation, experimentation, modelling, drafting, commenting, explaining etc. that inform diagrams of relatedness, as well as the politics of their production and use.

Prof. Dr. Marianne Sommer
Project Leader
T +41 41 229 56 15
marianne.sommerremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch 

Dr. Eric Hounshell, PhD
Project Coordinator/Postdoc
eric.hounshellremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch