Collecting Contagion: Moral Narratives of Sex and Stickiness in Alfred Fournier’s Wax Models

Silas Edwards is a doctoral researcher in visual history at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Gießen. He previously worked at the Frankfurt University Collections, and his research continues to center on collections and museums as resources to develop critical perspectives on visual, social and environmental history. His doctoral project examines the role of industrial color printing in popularizing butterfly collecting around 1900, both by aiding classification and by facilitating the colonial trade in ‘exotic’ insect specimens.