Seminar Details

Seminar Lab Date: October 30, 2023

Seminar Lab Subject: The Great Lisbon Earthquake in 18th-Century Philosophy and Seismology

Seminar Lab Presenter: Anna Graber, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History of Science and Technology, U of MN

Seminar Lab Location:

In-person only at U of Minnesota Keller Hall Room 3-230
Address: 200 Union St. SE, Minneapolis MN (parking ramp is next door)  Directions 
Lecture start time 7:00 PM CDT

Seminar Lab Detail:

Summary: On the morning of November 1, 1755, the feast of All Saints’ Day, the city of Lisbon was nearly entirely destroyed in an earthquake, a tidal wave, and the resulting fires. The Great Lisbon Earthquake became the defining natural disaster of the Enlightenment, and it sparked a crisis in European philosophy as well as reinvigorating scholarship on earthquakes.  This talk explores the connections between philosophy and early seismology, as theorists of earth—in particular the Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov—worked to rescue Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophical optimism from Voltaire’s withering post-Lisbon critiques by finding a purpose—metallogenesis—for earthquakes. Be ready for poetry and phlogiston!

Biography: Anna Graber is Assistant Professor of History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota. She holds appointments in Minnesota’s HST program and in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her research is on the meanings and uses of the Earth and its products in Russian history. In the book manuscript she is preparing for publication, “Tsardom of Rock: Science, Society, and Enlightenment in Russia’s Mining Empire,” she examines how in the eighteenth-century leaders of the mining industry developed new methods of knowing and ruling Russia’s natural environment and imperial subjects, in the process forging the modern Russian Empire.