Books and Brains
Event & ONLINE EXHIBITION | DIGITAL PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | September 2020
Co-Organizer and Curator: Meghan Testerman, Behavioral Sciences Librarian, Lewis Library, Princeton University
Books and Brains was originally envisioned as a pop-up exhibit event for the Psychology and Neuroscience departments at Princeton University (first organized in the spring of 2019, occurring again in December 2019) as a way to invite non-humanities community members into Special Collections and showcase material that speaks to their research interests.
To respond to overwhelming success and enthusiasm (all sessions immediately reached capacity, ultimately hosting almost sixty visitors), this event and the objects featured in it will be fully digitized and translated into an online exhibition to be hosted on the Digital Princeton University Library website.
Featuring nineteen items spanning over 460 years of history, the event and online exhibition examines the ways in which humanity’s understanding, interpretation and general study of the body, brain, psyche and self have shifted and changed over time. Organized into eight categories (Early Modern Anatomy and Early Neurology; Psychology textbooks; Madness; Physiognomy and Phrenology; Darwin; Princeton and McCosh; Psychological Testing; Jung) the items in this collection range from the early modern anatomical texts of Andreas Vesalilus to an entirely unique mnemonic book from the Baroque period to a signed copy of President McCosh’s lectures on psychology to a suitcase containing the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Each object is individually fascinating, but brought together, the collection tells a compelling story of both how far science has come in the fields of psychology and neurology, but also the themes that seem to stand the test of time. How can the scholars and scientists at Princeton today relate to, build upon, and reimagine, those of the past both in the work that they do, but also the role they embody in society?
