Performances of Wonder: Science and Spectacle
9 March - 25 May 2025
Biography
Professor Tita Chico is an internationally recognised figure in the study of the history of literary and scientific cultures of the eighteenth century. She is the author of two highly esteemed monographic studies of the eighteenth century, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005) and The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (2018). Her most recent book, On Wonder: Literature, Science, and the Long Eighteenth Century, is contracted with Cambridge University Press and she is at work on her next major book, Devices of Enlightenment: A Literary History of Technology. She is the author of more than twenty articles and chapters on a range of eighteenth-century cultural topics and has served as an editor for various book and journal special issues. She has been awarded visiting professorships and fellowships at St. Andrews, Tübingen, New College Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, Chawton House and the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London in the last decade alone. Professor Chico’s recent work has re-centred the literary and the affective in studies of eighteenth-century knowledge production: she has shown that literary ways of knowing and feeling must be part of the history of the Enlightenment, including histories of the Enlightenment as the emergence of rationalisation and the technological domination of nature.
Research Summary
The project, “Performances of Wonder: Science and Spectacle,” turns to the unexplained, the mysterious, and the odd as paradigmatic
occasions of wonder in eighteenth-century theatre and science. While the phrase “child-like wonder” implies an uninformed and uncorrupted response to something in the world, “Performances of Wonder” demonstrates that wonder in the long 18th century was a powerful way of understanding and engaging the world. “Performances of Wonder” teaches an important lesson: feeling played a constitutive role in the formulation of Enlightenment rationalization, a conclusion that directly challenges the uncritical celebration of objectivity that obscures this important history. The concept of wonder and its performance reveals the imaginative underpinnings of how we come to understand the natural world and its various phenomena. Building on the shared quality of performance inherent to 18th-century theatre and scientific practice, “Performances of Wonder” will advance the fields of theatre history, literary studies, and the history of science, and will
uniquely pilot experiential learning and research methodologies. The project also promises to chart new connections between the arts and STEM disciplines that will be valuable not only to the field of eighteenth-century studies, but also to modern-day debates about the veracity of scientific inquiry.
Professors McGirr and Chico are both senior scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies. With its focus on wonder as a performance technology and a scientific principle, the project combines their specific areas of expertise—McGirr’s work on theatre history and performance studies, and Chico’s on literary history and the history of science. Their collaboration will be grounded in research that draws upon holdings at UoB, including plays that feature wonder and science in the UoB Theatre collection and early scientific treatises in Special Collections that record scientific demonstrations.
Professor Chico's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course.
You can contact Professor Chico's host Professor Elaine McGirr for further information.
