Please join us to hear Eva Hemmungs Wirtén talk about the Victorian fascination with classification and scientific control and its relationship to the display of wild animals in the natural history museum. By considering wild animals as boundary objects of private and public ownership and control, Professor Wirtén connects the element of performativity in the new public space of the museum with an emerging culture of intellectual property, which increasingly depends on staging its properties, sometimes through lies, trickery, and fraud. Based on her work in Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), Professor Wirtén will connect the past with the present by discussing what impact the digitization of museum collections has on the intersection of private and public.

Professor Wirtén will also be giving a History of Science brown bag at noon on October 30 (204 Bradley Memorial Building) on "Branding Science: the Intellectual Properties of Marie Curie."