Accompanying book and acknowledgments
A Voyage Round the World: Charles Darwin and the Beagle Collections in the University of Cambridge (ed. Alison M. Pearn, with a foreword by Richard Darwin Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Published in Charles Darwin's bicentenary year to mark his particular connection with the University of Cambridge, A Voyage Round the World complements not only the exhibition in Cambridge University Library but also permanent exhibitions in the University Museum of Zoology and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Richly illustrated with material from these collections and those of the University Herbarium and Christ's College, it tells the story of the Beagle voyage and describes the collections themselves.
The book is available through the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Sedgwick Museum. price £10.
This exhibition would not have been possible without the time and expertise, generously given, of the following contributors to the book on whose work the text of the exhibition panels and captions relies:
Lyall Anderson is currently researching Charles Darwin's rock collection at the Sedgwick Museum. His background is in museum work, palaeontology and field geology. His interest in geology developed from fossil collecting in the Old Red Sandstone quarries of the East of Scotland.
Katherine Antoniw received her MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College. She is currently investigating Darwin's petrological collections from the Beagle voyage for the Sedgwick Museum's `Darwin the Geologist' exhibition.
Jim Bloxam is Senior Book Conservator at Cambridge University Library. His research interests lie mainly in the history of books. He conserved Conrad Martens's sketchbooks I and III. Extracts from his 1998 Honours dissertation exploring Martens's interpretation of his mandate and his concept of the activity of `sketching' are published on the Cambridge University Library website.
Adrian Friday is at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, where, until 2006, he was Curator of Vertebrates. He has had an interest in Darwin the zoologist since even before he was taught by Sydney Smith.
Candace Guite is the College Librarian at Christ's College, Cambridge. Her primary research interests are Darwin's experience of College life, and his university education in its widest aspects. She has followed Darwin from his favourite beetle hunting grounds in the Fens to a visit to the Galapagos Islands in 2008.
Shelley Innes is an editor of The correspondence of Charles Darwin. She has a special interest in Darwin's barnacle work and his correspondence with German naturalists.
Simon Keynes is Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College.
David Kohn is Oxnam Professor of Science and Society, Emeritus, at Drew University, and general editor of the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution. He was formerly an editor with the Darwin Correspondence Project, and was co-editor of Charles Darwin's Notebooks: 1836–1842.
David Norman is the Director of the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge University. His research is focused on the systematics, functional biology, biogeography and evolution of ornithischian dinosaurs and he has written a number of more popular books on the subject, including `A very short introduction to Dinosaurs' for OUP. He is the Odell Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he teaches geology and zoology in the Natural Science Tripos.
John Parker is Professor of Plant Cytogenetics in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, Curator of the University Herbarium, and Director of the University Botanic Garden. His experimental research concerns the genetic structure of plant populations, while his historical research examines the research programme of John Henslow, Darwin's mentor, at Cambridge in the early 19th century.
Alison Pearn is Assistant Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge and co-editor of Evolution: selected letters of Charles Darwin 1860-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Richard Preece is Senior Assistant Curator in Malacology in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. He shares with Leonard Jenyns an interest in land and freshwater molluscs and is a specialist in their history during the Quaternary ice ages.
Alistair Sponsel is a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, DC. He studies the history of the life- and earth-sciences and is currently writing about theories of coral reef formation since the eighteenth century.
Paul White is an editor on the Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge, and is the author of Thomas Huxley: Making the `Man of Science'(Cambridge University Press, 2003)
The curators would also like to thank the directors and curators of all the collections who have contributed material to this exhibition; the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project for providing links to transcriptions of letters; Reeve Photography, and the Cambridge University Library Imaging Services department for illustrations; and Cambridge University Press for their generous support of both exhibition and book. Many individuals have also contributed, in particular Rosemary Clarkson, Richard Marley, Chris McLeod, Elizabeth Smith, Josephine Warrior, and Lihua Zhu.