Greenwich as a home and observatory: the Airy family and the RGO collections

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• Megan Briers (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Monday 28 April 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

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MHMW02 - Modern History of Mathematics: Looking Ahead

Recent literature has demonstrated the importance of assessing how narratives are impacted by the archiving and documenting practices of the actors and institutions we study. In the case of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, George Airy, the British Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881, constructed a vast archive to justify the observatory’s existence in a period when its stability was under threat. This archive has been a key resource for historians of Victorian science, and my paper will first highlight how it can reveal previously unacknowledged participation of the broader Airy family in astronomical investigations. However, I will also discuss the mechanisms by which the importance of family/domestic practices became concealed by practices of archival organisation and exclusion. There has been little critical attention to choices made in the formation of the observatory’s archives: Greenwich was also the site of the Airys’ home but an artificial divide between institutional and domestic spaces endures in the organisation of the archives. By re-integrating excluded archive material, I will demonstrate the centrality of family identities and domestic spaces in key episodes in the history of Greenwich and Victorian astronomy, centring women’s previously obscured labour in shaping family members’ reputations and historical memory. 

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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