As part of the Alumni Festival (18-20 September), Darwin College is delighted to welcome Dr Edwin Rose for a special lecture exploring the history and legacy of one of Britain’s most distinguished scientific families.
Date: Saturday 19 September
Time: 5:45- 6:45pm
Where: Lady Mitchel Hall, Sidgwick Site, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA
Seventy-five complimentary places have been reserved for Darwin College alumni, though the lecture is open to all alumni attending the Festival.
Reunion Dinner
Following the lecture, a reunion dinner for alumni of all years will be held in College from 7pm.
Book your place for dinner here.
About the Lecture
The Darwin family has remained one of the most prominent scientific dynasties in Britain from the turn of the eighteenth century. Drawing on ongoing research for the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Darwinian Inheritance: Communication and Empire in the Making of a Scientific Dynasty’ this talk aims to understand the Darwins as a family. Working through numerous land books, family trees and the Darwin Family Portrait Collection held by Darwin College among other things, this talk explores how generations of the Darwin family actively researched their own history. It aims to answer the question of why the Darwin family carefully curated their heritage, outlining the different forms this research took and the purposes it served across three centuries.
About the Speaker
Dr Edwin Rose is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, and Bye-Fellow and Deputy Praelector at Darwin College, Cambridge. His current research project, Darwinian Inheritance: Communication and Empire in the Making of a Scientific Dynasty, examines the cultural and historical formation of the Darwin family legacy.
Dr Rose received both his MPhil and PhD from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge in 2021. He subsequently held the Munby Fellowship at Cambridge University Library, where he researched the early colonial and religious history of the Cambridge Botanic Garden, before becoming a researcher at Darwin College for the project The Darwin Family and Cambridge: Science, Art and Nature.
Between 2022 and 2025, Dr Rose was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Natural History in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1848, exploring the relationships between Indigenous knowledge and natural history in the Pacific, while also serving as Advanced Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge.