Reviews

“Drawing on rich, compelling sources, The Astronomer’s Chair is an original, provocative, and fascinating work.”
—David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, MIT

“This creatively illustrated study by an eminent historian uses a seemingly mundane theme, depictions of astronomers’ seating, to reveal with startling insight and expert craft the complex cultures of comfort, attention, and discipline that governed nineteenth-century stargazing.”
—Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge

“The Astronomer’s Chair takes us on an interdisciplinary journey through the history of science, design, imperialism, and material culture. With this book, Omar Nasim models thrilling new directions in intellectual inquiry.”
—Aviva Briefel, Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies, Bowdoin College

“A fascinating book that underscores how, in visual culture, it’s often pictures of those who explore science that best communicates the nature of their work.”
—Marvin Heiferman, curator and author of Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe

“The Astronomer’s Chair brings together disparate bodies of literature—from histories of fatigue science and hygiene to scholarship on decorative arts and postcolonial readings of Victorian travelogs—in a fluid and readable way. The book is beautifully illustrated, and Nasim has done an impressive job tracing the history of specific astronomers’ chairs back to their design and workshop production, the kind of object-based research that is often hampered by incomplete archives. It is an excellent example of the kinds of insights that can result from an interdisciplinary cultural history and illustrates how looking at mundane objects can reveal illuminating entanglements between science and society more broadly. I can also imagine this book being a useful teaching tool on a variety of subjects, particularly for teaching students to combine close reading and visual analysis, showing them that scientists are “products of their culture” and not isolated from the social worlds of which they are a part .”

—Sarah Pickman in H-Material-Culture, H-Net Reviews.

My latest book addresses the historical relationships between chair-design and observation, posture and science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Based on work in the archives and museums in the USA and Europe, the book advances an original framework for linking visual and material cultures, so that images of specialized mechanical observing chairs, used by astronomers at the telescope, are contextualized to reveal what they indexed for the period’s bourgeois sensibilities and their seated-postures. This rich context of meanings and values, then, is used to cast light on the actual design and observational function of observing chairs as objects­. Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral and visual economies of empire, the book shows that masculine science was represented in terms of “comfort,” and not just the rugged discomforts of colonial adventure and expedition. It also shows that distinct manly postures were made broadly compelling by their dissimilarity to images of cross-legged “Oriental” astronomers—a posture that designated for their western audiences another kind of scientific labor, another kind of science. The book concludes by extending these findings to the twentieth century and uses the moral economy developed to shed new light on the design and function of Freud’s orientalized couch.

The Astronomer’s Chair: A Visual and Cultural History is the first book-length essay on the place of seat-furniture in the history of science, particularly with respect to the astronomer’s gendered and racialized labor and body. With a focus on mechanically adjustable observing chairs used in conjunction with telescopes in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States in the nineteenth century, the book situates task-specific chairs at the intersection of multiple economies: moral, visual, and epistemic. Furniture and design historians have illuminated the normative place of the ordinary chair in the bourgeois home. What emerges are postures that indexed morality and character as much as health and “race.” I elucidate a stadial historicism that informed a moral economy of seat-furniture that takes it beyond the domestic and into the national and even the imperial spheres. I thus use this period eye to shed light on the significance of observing chairs and their widely distributed image for bourgeois spectators. This is contrasted with images by European artists that exhibited oriental astronomers seated cross-legged. Based on hundreds of travelogues written by nineteenth-century western travelers into the so-called “Orient,” I show that this posture was expressive for bourgeois spectators of character and morality but also of the epistemic and historical status of oriental astronomy. It’s not that the specially designed observing chairs changed the world; it is that particular assumptions about masculinity, racialized energy, and supposedly innate characteristics of non-European peoples had become so pervasive that they left their marks even in the design, function, and depiction of astronomers' chairs.

The Astronomer’s Chair decolonizes observing furniture as technologies of observation—whether in astronomy or psychoanalysis—and as such contributes to recent efforts to decolonize museum collections in the USA, Britain, and Europe. It in fact disclosures the gendered and racialized underpinnings of the visual and material cultures of science and furniture in the nineteenth century, underpinnings that have impacted the design of chairs and the expected scientific personae in them, right up to our own day.