Research Overview

I research nineteenth-century scientific and non-scientific discourses that utilise, theorise, or comment on physiognomic and pathognomic face-reading methods, using these methods to classify species and the relation between species. Beginning with Johann Caspar Lavater’s writing on physiognomy in the late eighteenth century and continuing to Charles Darwin’s study of pathognomy in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), my thesis sets scientific writing in dialogue with literary texts and argues that the animal face has an active role in shaping the development of face-reading theories concerning inter-subjective communication and identification.