Geoff Bil

History

Geoff Bil

Assistant Professor

gbil@udel.edu

Resources and Links

Google Scholar Citations

Geoff Bil's Personal Webite

The Clover and the Fern

Biography

Dr. Bil is a historian of science and European empires, with specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century botany, anthropology, empire, and Indigenous history. Prior to joining the University of Delaware, he was a 2018-2019 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden, and held predoctoral fellowships at the Newberry Library, University of Sussex, and Victoria University of Wellington. He received his PhD in History from the University of British Columbia (2018).

His first book manuscript, "Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples and Empire," is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. The project examines the history of Western engagements with Indigenous knowledge, with particular emphasis on the varied ways that Indigenous plant names have figured in imperial botany and anthropology. Previous histories have tended to focus on the erasure of Indigenous knowledges following the emergence of Linnaean nomenclature and classification. "Indexing the Indigenous" takes a different approach. Drawing on science studies and Indigenous critical approaches, and using examples drawn from Tahiti, the Himalayas, and especially Aotearoa New Zealand, from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century and beyond, this project examines the contingent, contested and ambivalent means by which European ways of naming and knowing plants achieved precedence. More importantly, through close analysis of field notebooks, private letters, botanical flora and other sources, it evidences contexts in which Indigenous botanical vocabularies continued to serve as currency both for colonial scientific fieldwork and Indigenous cultural perseverance.

Dr. Bil’s second book-length project, "Fields of Empire: Science, Ethnoscience and the Making of the American Century," tracks Western engagements with Indigenous knowledge under the emerging rubrics of ethnobotany and ethnoecology. Ranging from frontier anthropology, through iterations in the Philippines, Sumatra and Central America, "Fields of Empire" investigates the varied ways that Indigenous and Western ethnoscientists contributed to and contravened twentieth-century American colonizing interests. In so doing, it aims to elucidate the complex histories underlying a science vital to the comprehension of biocultural diversity today.

Dr. Bil serves as International Advisor for the British Society for the History of Science, and Associate Editor of Communiqué, the newsletter for the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science.

Recent Presentations

"Imperial Vernacular: Phytonymy, Philology and Disciplinarity in the Indo-Pacific," Global Epistemologies and Ontologies Webinar series, Wageningen University, NL, 2021.

“From Ethnoscience to Ethnology - and Back Again: Mātauranga Māori and Settler Epistemology in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” Encounters and Exchanges: Exploring the History of Science, Technology and Mātauranga, University of Otago and Tōtaranui 250 Trust, Blenheim, NZ, 2019.

“Cultivating Resistance: Ethnoecology, Anticolonialism and Indigenous Territoriality in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia,” History of Science Society, Utrecht, NL, sponsored by the Pacific Circle, 2019.

“Empire on the Line: Botanical Ethnology and Social Distance in Late-Eighteenth-Century Tahiti,” Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Bard College, 2019.

“Troubled Translations: Science and Ethnoscience in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia,” Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of British Columbia, 2019.