Fougeroux de Bondaroy spent his life in the shadows. His uncle, Duhamel du Monceau, invested the family fortune and decades of labor growing, cutting, and experimenting on trees that could inform the French navy of better ways to grow timber. Fougeroux was absorbed into this world at his mother’s death, adopted and trained by his uncle to tend to research subjects whose lives would extend past their own. As a botanist in his own right, Fougeroux’s research remained anchored to his uncle’s legacy, even as he navigated new scientific, social and political contexts on the eve of the Revolution. Duhamel and Fougeroux lived and worked in the same spaces, institutions, and disciplines, and addressed the same experiments a generation apart. This talk will explore the personal and professional intimacies that sustained a research program dependent on time, the benefit and burden of that intellectual inheritance, and the role of institutions and communities whose perpetual lives made them essential for carrying research forward into the future.
Sponsoring Organizations:
New York University
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Columbia University in the City of New York
City University of New York
The New York Academy of Sciences
The New York Academy of Medicine
