AHRC-NSF MOU International Initiative in the History of Evolutionary Views of Human Nature

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This award will support work to research, edit, and publish all the letters to and from Darwin in the crucial years 1871 to 1873 when Darwin was producing his books On the Descent of Man and On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This period was one of the most significant in Darwin's life, and one of the most controversial. This award will enable the PI to foster young scholars in the history of science who will actively contribute to the award-winning series of publications The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. It also serves to establish significant international collaboration between Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, UK, bringing together expertise on Charles Darwin and the human sciences, and drawing widely on scholarship in the two universities. The project will be supported in large part by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, by way of an International Initiative between AHRC and NSF. The research aim is to explore the theories and evidence underlying Darwin's pioneering proposals about the biological nature of humankind. This will be achieved by publishing all Darwin's known correspondence in the period (consisting of about 2000 letters) and by providing scholarly notes that explain the content along with copious additional interpretative material. The goal of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin is to make this remarkable archival material accessible both in print and online to a wide audience. Previous volumes in the series have won praise for the excellence of its editorial procedures and the accessibility of its research findings. Young scholars will join a noted international team and receive one of the most highly valued trainings in editorial methods currently available in the historical sciences. Even though a number of scholarly and popular accounts have already addressed several of these questions, only a small proportion of the full range of documents in Darwin's archive have been readily available. This project will transform understanding of Darwin's theories about humankind and provide free access to fundamental original documents to readers across the globe.