Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.
Khoekhoen are the traditionally nomadic pastoralist indigenous population of southwestern Africa. They are often grouped with the hunter-gatherer San peoples. The designation "Khoekhoe" is actually a kare or praise address, not an ethnic endonym, but it has been used in the literature as an ethnic term for Khoe-speaking peoples of Southern Africa, particularly pastoralist groups, such as the !Ora, !Gona, Nama, Xiri and ǂNūkhoe nations.
Hottentot is a term that was historically used to refer to the Khoekhoe, indigenous nomadic pastoralists of South Africa.
Sarah Baartman, also spelled Sara, sometimes in the diminutive form Saartje, or Saartjie, and Bartman, Bartmann, was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, a name which was later attributed to at least one other woman similarly exhibited. The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type uncommon in Western Europe which not only was perceived as a curiosity at that time, but became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection.
William Bullock was an English traveller, naturalist and antiquarian. He established what was called Bullock's Museum, first in Liverpool which he then moved to London.
Human zoos, also known as ethnological expositions, were public displays of people, usually in a so-called "natural" or "primitive" state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays sometimes emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that purported marginalized groups as "savage". The idea of a "savage" derives from Columbus's voyages that deemed European culture remained pure, while other cultures were titled impure or "wild", and this stereotype relies heavily on the idea that different ways of living were "cast out by God", as other cultures do not recognize Christianity in relation to Creation. Throughout their existence such exhibitions garnered controversy over their demeaning, derogatory, and dehumanizing nature. They began as a part of circuses and "freak shows" which displayed exotic humans in a manner akin to a caricature which exaggerated their differences. They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits' inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple colonial exhibitions and at temporary exhibitions in animal zoos.
Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race and empire.
Robert Gordon Latham FRS was an English ethnologist and philologist.
Elongated labia is a feature of certain Khoikhoi and other African women who develop, whether naturally or through artificial stretching, relatively elongated labia minora, which may hang up to four inches outside the vulva when they are standing in an upright position.
Renée Green is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her pluralistic practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, architecture, photography, prints, video, film, websites, and sound, which normally converge in highly layered and complex installations. She works to draw on cultural anthropology as well as social history, making her works well-researched and many times involving collaborators. Some of the topics she has covered include Sarah Baartman, the African slave trade, and hip hop in Germany.
Henrietta Emma Ratcliffe Rae was a British painter of the late Victorian era, who specialised in classical, allegorical and literary subjects. Her best-known painting is The Lady with the Lamp (1891); depicting Florence Nightingale at Scutari.
Venus is a 1996 play written by American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks about the life of Khoekhoe woman Sarah Baartman. Set during the 19th century, the play opens in South Africa where Baartman was born, before transitioning to Europe as Baartman begins to perform in freak shows in London. The play then transitions to Paris where she continues her freak show act before dying in 1815 after being under the study of a group of French scientists led by Georges Cuvier. Her deceased body becomes the subject of a pseudoscientific autopsy that focuses on Baartman's steatopygia– a condition which Cuvier, uses to his academic advantage. Parks' work is not intended to be historically accurate, but rather uses the concept of Baartman's career to explore colonialism, racialization, and the historical sexualization of Black women; as Parks explains, "most of it's fabricated... It's questioning the history of history... It embraces the unrecorded truth." Venus won 2 OBIE Awards in 1995-1996.
Philippa Judith Amanda Levine, FRAI, FRHistS, is a historian of the British Empire, gender, race, science and technology. She has spent most of her career in the United States and has been Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities (2010–17) and Walter Prescott Webb Professor in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alexandra Shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. In 2018 Shepard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition for her work in gender history and the social history of early modern Britain. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Priyamvada Gopal is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019).
Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. She is the first black professor of Classics in the UK, and the first woman director of the ICS.
A conversazione is a "social gathering [predominantly] held by [a] learned or art society" for conversation and discussion, especially about the arts, literature, medicine, and science.
The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman is a 1998 South African documentary film directed by Zola Maseko.
The Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, or the Aborigines Select Committee, was a select committee of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Folayemi "Fo" Debra Wilson is an American interdisciplinary artist, designer, and academic administrator. Her practice includes work as a furniture designer and maker, installation artist, muralist, and graphic designer. Wilson is the first associate dean for access and equity in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture.
