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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Nick Hopwood, âHaeckelâs Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraudâ (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Description: Nick Hopwoodâs Haeckelâs Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood is Reader in History of Science at Cambridge University, and creator on the online exhibition âMaking Visible Embryos,â which display some of the images from the book.
Hopwoodâs ambitious book retraces the social life of drawings of embryos first produced in 1868 by the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. The book follows the turbulent travels of the images across 150 years and three countries. Some of the perennial controversy surroundin...