Project History

The John Tyndall Correspondence Project was initiated by Bernard Lightman, Professor in the Division of Humanities at York University. The project has expanded to include scholars from many other academic institutions around the world. The goal of the project is two-fold. First, we will publish a one-volume calendar of the correspondence of the Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) and issue his collected correspondence, both in print (an expected twelve to fourteen volumes) and, eventually, in an accessible, searchable, on-line format. The correspondence is expected to number just over 6000 items both to and from Tyndall. Second, we hope to galvanize a community of scholars at varied stages in their careers, from graduate students to postdoctoral researchers to senior scholars, around themes raised through an intense study of John Tyndall’s correspondence. These themes include the relationship between science and religion, the popularization and professionalization of science, and advances in physics, glaciology, climatology, and spontaneous generation, each of which individually and collectively played fundamental roles in the development of modern science. The project will draw on the expertise of scholars from five countries that specialize in the history and philosophy of Victorian science and technology, and it will incorporate graduate and undergraduate education along with the training of postdoctoral researchers. The size and variety of the archive encourages us to formulate new way of undertaking historical research. What we propose is a unique, international, collaborative project that will provide scholars with an important resource that is currently difficult to access.