This blogpost was authored by Professor Tita Chico, who is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Professor Chico visited the University of Bristol in Spring 2025 to collaborate with Professor Elaine McGirr on a Benjamin Meaker award.
I had the great fortune to work with Professor Elaine McGirr, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Theatre Department. Our collaborative project, “Performances of Wonder: Science and Spectacle,” turned to the unexplained, the mysterious, and the odd as paradigmatic occasions of wonder in eighteenth-century theatre and science. While the phrase “child-like wonder” implies an uninformed and uncorrupted response to something in the world, our project demonstrated that wonder in the long 18th century was a powerful way of understanding and engaging the world, and teaches an important lesson: feeling played a constitutive role in the formulation of Enlightenment rationalization, a conclusion that directly challenges the uncritical celebration of objectivity that obscures this important history.
And to add, this work is inspired by the scholar Katherine McKittrick, who teaches us that “Wonder is study.”
In various activities, including lectures, seminars, and (the centrepiece of our collaboration) a day-long symposium, we studied the imaginative underpinnings of how we come to understand the world, whether in nature or on the stage, with a particular emphasis on the forms of technology that facilitate these encounters.
For example, my lecture and seminar for students, “On Wonder and Equiano,” argued that the concept of “wonder” illuminates the relationship between literature and science, which in turn challenges us to reimagine what studying the eighteenth century can and ought to do. Drawing on René Descartes and Adam Smith, I demonstrated that the knowing of wonder—that is, the affective experience of wonder is always also a cognitive experience—conjoins observation and imagination, and models a mode of apprehension and cognition that thinks through science to conjure a world where space and time can be reimagined, where their fullness and amplitude open up other possibilities.
Turning to a text the students were studying, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789), I argued that Equiano’s wonder inaugurates profoundly important moments of reckoning—and reimagining. The Interesting Narrative is Equiano’s autobiography, the story of his life as an enslaved African trafficked to the West Indies and Virginia, and as a free Black man who had purchased his manumission in 1766. The narrative is replete with wonder, including specific encounters with scientific technology such as a clock, an “iron muzzle,” and a Davis quadrant. When Equiano uses the phrase, “all made up of wonders,” he captures the intimacy of technology and terror that shape his life, registering his consciousness, and his refusal, of being subjected to tyrannical and abusive power. Nor does Equiano’s assessment emerge in isolation, but in recognition of the whole-scale system of what historian Stephanie E. Smallwood calls saltwater slavery—its brutality, violence, fixedness. Equiano’s wonder challenges us to recognize and imagine the future that he sees—the future of abolition and the future of social, legal, and ethical equity, an incomplete yet ongoing collective project.
The centerpiece of our collaboration was a day-long symposium or, to more accurately, a “makerspace.” This format of a “makerspace” is key to the intellectual goals and underpinnings of “Performances of Wonder.” Makerspaces, as colleagues at the University of Virginia (USA) explain, are “learning spaces that foster creativity, tangible knowledge production, communal knowledge sharing, openness, and experimentation.” They are, by intentional design, spaces that encourage curiosity and questioning, engagement and play, confusion and discovery.
“Wonder! A Makerspace Day” fostered experiential learning and research methodologies that were focused on wonder as an object, a sensation, and a way of being curious about the world. Participants of Wonder! moved between makerspaces in the Theatre Department, Theatre Collection (one of the world’s largest archives of British theatre history and Live Art), and the Bristol Common Press (a working historical print shop located at the University of Bristol). Drawing upon its eighteenth-century connections with science and spectacle, Wonder! featured hands-on workshops that brought eighteenth-century practices and archives into the modern day, and invited participants to experience, study, and learn through the haptics of wonder. Individually and collectively, participants learned new ways of producing, apprehending, and teaching knowledge, both embodied and abstract.
In the workshop “Printing Wonder!” participants designed bespoke pages and made prints on the Bristol Common Press’s replica 18th-century oak common press. In this makerspace, participants learned historical practice and utilized contemporary improvisation to study the haptics of wonder available through the heritage and tradition of letterpress printing.
The workshop “Seeing Wonder!” featured various optical instruments of wonder, ranging from an eighteenth-century peep show, a nineteenth-century magic lantern, and 21st-century VR technologies held in the Theatre Collection’s and U of B Special Collection’s archives. By experimenting with this range of technologies, participants practically investigated how the experience of wonder has been, is now, and might be manufactured, learning in the process that instruments (whether for science or the stage) rely upon improvisation and performance.
The collaborative project, “Performances of Wonder: Science and Spectacle,” has already yielded identifiable research results. Based on the work of Wonder! A Makerspace Day, we are co-editing a collection of essays for an internationally respected, peer-reviewed journal. I also have a piece forthcoming in the highly regarded, public facing humanities journal, Public Books, based on the cinematographic possibilities afforded by science, spectacle, and eighteenth-century archives.
Moreover, our collaboration not only advances the fields of theatre history, literary studies, and the history of science, but also uniquely pilots experiential learning and research methodologies and charts new connections between the arts and STEM disciplines. “Performances of Wonder: Science and Spectacle” offers important contributions to modern-day debates about the veracity of scientific inquiry and the role of the imagination in education and research.
My many thanks to the University of Bristol for this absolutely fantastic and generative research opportunity.
