The long eighteenth century textual landscape is populated by wonders and by wondering: one encounters seemingly countless objects of wonder and just as many experiences of wonder. These texts take up wonder as a noun and a verb, as an object and feeling, as an experience both emotional and intellectual. They also imagine wonder in relation to emergent notions of scientific practice and accounts of the natural world writ large. There are accounts of groaning trees; individuals who lived to upwards of 140 years; a “Tartar Lamb,” or a “Vegetable Lamb,” part animal, part vegetable; the moon bleeding; a tiny bird with a warble that shakes a gazebo; an insect that lives three years but also lives one day; a white Dutch boy with legible Latin and Hebrew inscribed in his eyes; a white Devonshire woman whose legs self-amputate; an enslaved Black African man in the Middle Passage seeing an expansive world through a quadrant immediately before reaching the horrific human marketplace of Barbados. While the specifics may differ in tenor and tone, inquiry and conclusion, these texts reveal the power and interest that wonder as a concept conveyed in the British long eighteenth century. These are all objects that provoke wonder in those who witness or learn about them; they generate a desire for narrative and explanation; and they invite us to see differently and to imagine a world otherwise. In this talk, drawn from my recent On Wonder (Cambridge 2025), I discuss why—intellectually, pedagogically, and politically—we need to wonder
Tita Chico is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of three monographs, most recently On Wonder (Cambridge 2025), and is currently at work on a new book, Devices of Enlightenment: A Literary History of Technology. Chico will spend spring 2026 as Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251106T230000Z DTEND:20251107T003000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR